The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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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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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Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
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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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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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My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
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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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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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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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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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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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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.
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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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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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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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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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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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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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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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