In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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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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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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