And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
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Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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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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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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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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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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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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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
ALAN LIGHTMAN