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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

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
Suffers
Holds
Slowly
Ambition
Suffering
Persons
Unknowingly
Person
Knowingly
World
Ambitions

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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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.
Alan Lightman
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
Alan Lightman
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
Alan Lightman
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
Alan Lightman
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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I'd like to use my time more carefully.
Alan Lightman
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
Alan Lightman
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
Alan Lightman
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
Alan Lightman
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
Alan Lightman
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My second novel, Good Benito, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
Alan Lightman
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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. 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.
Alan Lightman
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration. A book, especially a longer book, it's a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It's a vision of the whole thing.
Alan Lightman
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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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?
Alan Lightman
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I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power.
Alan Lightman