Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
ALAN LIGHTMANWho would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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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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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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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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The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
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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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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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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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He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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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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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN