Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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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.
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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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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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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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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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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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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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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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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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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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With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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There is a place where time stands still.
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I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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