Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
ALAN LIGHTMANEach future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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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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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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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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Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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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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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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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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As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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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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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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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.
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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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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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When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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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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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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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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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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