Alan Lightman Quotes
The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
-But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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. And if we can't unplug from that machine, eventually we're going to become mindless.
Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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.
You say, "Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse." And that's enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
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.
The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
I've taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it's a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
As a scientist, I don't believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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.
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.
Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.
That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.
My second novel, "Good Benito", was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer - in the form of a review or something.
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.
One day I'm going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do....is to watch these birds.
It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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.
Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.