You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
ALAN LIGHTMANTime is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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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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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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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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As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
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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.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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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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I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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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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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
ALAN LIGHTMAN