And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
ALAN LIGHTMANI re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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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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When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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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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When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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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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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.
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The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN -
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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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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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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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
ALAN LIGHTMAN