Alan Lightman Quotes

• The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.

  Alan Lightman

  Alan Lightman (2012). “Mr g: A Novel About the Creation”, p.25, Vintage

  4963

• 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

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.46, Vintage

  4068

• 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

  4207

• One day I'm going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do....is to watch these birds.

  Alan Lightman

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  667

• Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.

  Alan Lightman

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  3411

• Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

  Alan Lightman

  2674

• 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

  3848

• 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

  660

• 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.

  Alan Lightman

  3862

• In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.

  Alan Lightman

  1351

• Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

  Alan Lightman

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.21, Vintage

  3388

• 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

  Alan Lightman (2012). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.74, Hachette UK

  1316

• We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.

  Alan Lightman

  2942

• The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?

  Alan Lightman

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  4694

• 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, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

  Alan Lightman

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.30, Vintage

  769

• Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

  Alan Lightman

  Alan Lightman (2014). “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”, p.21, Vintage

  1867

• The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world. The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway. We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

  Alan Lightman

  Alan Lightman (2000). “Great Ideas in Physics”, p.4, McGraw Hill Professional

  2936

• As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not. The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.

  Alan Lightman

  Alan Lightman (2014). “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”, p.37, Vintage

  2171

• 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

  Alan Lightman (2014). “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”, p.30, Vintage

  5014

• 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.

  Alan Lightman

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  1141

• 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

  Country   Emotional   Class  

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  556

• 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

  Country  

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  4919

• 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

  Emotional  

  "Reviewing Mr g: Physicist-turned-novelist Alan Lightman meets God at the intersection of science and religion". Interview with Greg Quill, www.thestar.com. February 12, 2012.

  2120

• In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.

  Alan Lightman

  Alan Lightman (2014). “The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew”, p.5, Vintage

  913

• No one ever expects poetry to sell...

  Alan Lightman

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

  4080

• What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?

  Alan Lightman

  854

• 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

  Alan Lightman (2011). “Einstein's Dreams”, p.20, Vintage

  3563

• 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

  Alan Lightman (2012). “Mr g: A Novel About the Creation”, p.33, Vintage

  296

• 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

  Alan Lightman (2012). “Mr g: A Novel About the Creation”, p.25, Vintage

  2326

• I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we're required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection. I believe that we need to slow down.

  Alan Lightman

  2662

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