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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Time
World
Stuck
Tragedy
Joy
Happiness
Whether
Happy
Pain

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
Alan Lightman
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
Alan Lightman
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
Alan Lightman
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Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
Alan Lightman
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Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
Alan Lightman
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. 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.
Alan Lightman
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails. 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
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country... people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.
Alan Lightman
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Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.
Alan Lightman
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
Alan Lightman
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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
Alan Lightman
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Oh, love is very much a physical thing.... I realize that it's very complicated, and I'm sure it can't be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it's very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
Alan Lightman
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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. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
Alan Lightman
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
Alan Lightman