I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
ALAN LIGHTMANAnd 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
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I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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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.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
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We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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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.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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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.
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