Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
ALAN LIGHTMANEach person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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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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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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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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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He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
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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.
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We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
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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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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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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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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
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Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
ALAN LIGHTMAN