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.
ALAN LIGHTMANThat’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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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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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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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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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country… people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
ALAN LIGHTMAN