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.
ALAN LIGHTMANA 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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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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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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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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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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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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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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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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I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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