We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
ALAN LIGHTMANWe have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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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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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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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 don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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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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I value my correspondence with writers…
ALAN LIGHTMAN