As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
ALAN LIGHTMANI 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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Will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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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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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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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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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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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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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
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Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
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A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
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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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“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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