Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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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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It’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.
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A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
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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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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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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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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
ALAN LIGHTMAN