The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
ALAN LIGHTMANIf you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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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.
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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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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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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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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.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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Illuminated 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.
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
ALAN LIGHTMAN