Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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 appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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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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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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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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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
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I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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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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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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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
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As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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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.
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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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