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 LIGHTMANI think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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 certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
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The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
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We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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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.
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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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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
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