I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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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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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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Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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Who 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?
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN