Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMANIlluminated 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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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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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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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.
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
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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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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
ALAN LIGHTMAN