If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
ALAN LIGHTMANMy second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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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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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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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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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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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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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
ALAN LIGHTMAN