Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMANThere is a place where time stands still.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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There is a place where time stands still.
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
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“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.
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There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
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And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
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I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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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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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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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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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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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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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 LIGHTMAN