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.
ALAN LIGHTMANI should have written books instead of reading them.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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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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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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I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
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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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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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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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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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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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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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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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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 world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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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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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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