We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
-
-
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
ALAN LIGHTMAN