The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
ALAN LIGHTMANI 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.
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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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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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It’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.
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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.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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There is a place where time stands still.
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I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
ALAN LIGHTMAN