We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
ALAN LIGHTMANEach time is true, but the truths are not the same.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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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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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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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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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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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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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 LIGHTMAN