I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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
-
-
While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
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 -
Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
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 -
Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
ALAN LIGHTMAN