We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
ALAN LIGHTMANScientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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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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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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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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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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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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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
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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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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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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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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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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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