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.
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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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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We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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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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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
ALAN LIGHTMAN