If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMANI would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of … shall we say, power.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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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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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
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It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
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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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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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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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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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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