You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
ALAN LIGHTMANFaith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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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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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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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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The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
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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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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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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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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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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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For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
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