There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
ALAN LIGHTMANFor 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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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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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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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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To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.
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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. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMAN