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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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Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Worlds
Content
Reason
Live
Long
World
People
Contradictory

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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 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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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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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 book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. 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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No one ever expects poetry to sell...
Alan Lightman
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
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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There is a place where time stands still ...illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together. If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn't be real.
Alan Lightman
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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself. And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don't think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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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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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All writers have roots they draw from - travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
Alan Lightman