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 LIGHTMANIs 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?
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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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I believe that we need to slow down.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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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.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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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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