Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
ALAN LIGHTMANA book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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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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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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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…
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
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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 appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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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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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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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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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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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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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