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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?

Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Nature
Reciprocity
Anything
Oceans
Persons
Wanting
Back
Clouds
Person
Rain
Without
Ocean
Love
Pure
Replenishing
Like
Possible
Evaporating

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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.
Alan Lightman
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
Alan Lightman
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
Alan Lightman
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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. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
Alan Lightman
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As I understand it, a universe is a ... well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.
Alan Lightman
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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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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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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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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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Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.
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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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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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.
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