Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
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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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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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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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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 have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
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If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
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Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
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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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“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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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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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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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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.
ALAN LIGHTMAN