All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
ALAN LIGHTMAN“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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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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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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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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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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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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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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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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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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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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.
ALAN LIGHTMAN