Continents of memory had been lost.
ALAN LIGHTMANOur species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
-
-
Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Most people have learned to live in the moment.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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?
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
A world with one month is a world of equality.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
ALAN LIGHTMAN