The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMANAlthough technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
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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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In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
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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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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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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.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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One day I’m going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do….is to watch these birds.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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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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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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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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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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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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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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As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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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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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN