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  • Alan Lightman Quotes   148
  • I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Writing Quotes , Our World Quotes
  • One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones. In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads. When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are...they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded. We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Phones Quotes , Cells Quotes
  • Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes
  • I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Law Quotes , Play Quotes
  • 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. It's a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Years Quotes
  • Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old. Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Pain Quotes , Children Quotes
  • 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. Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession. And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Time Quotes , Church Bells Quotes
  • 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. That's an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Country Quotes , Emotional Quotes
  • 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. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Years Quotes
  • Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. ... It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Learning Quotes , Past Quotes
  • But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Past Quotes , Laughing Quotes