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.
ALAN LIGHTMANTime is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
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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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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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Children 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.
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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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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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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 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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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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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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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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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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