I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
ALAN LIGHTMANAnd at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
ALAN LIGHTMAN