And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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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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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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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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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
ALAN LIGHTMAN