Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
ALAN LIGHTMANThat someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
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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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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
ALAN LIGHTMAN