In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
ALAN LIGHTMANI am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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 acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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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…
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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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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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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.
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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
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One day I’m going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do….is to watch these birds.
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In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
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For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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?
ALAN LIGHTMAN