We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe 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.
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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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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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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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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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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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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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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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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Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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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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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
ALAN LIGHTMAN