It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
ALAN LIGHTMANContinents of memory had been lost.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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A 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.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.
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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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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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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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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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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
ALAN LIGHTMAN