Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
ALAN LIGHTMANExcept for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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.
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There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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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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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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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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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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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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We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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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 have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
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