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.
ALAN LIGHTMANChildren curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
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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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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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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?
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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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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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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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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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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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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
ALAN LIGHTMAN