Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
ALAN LIGHTMANWriters are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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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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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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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.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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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.
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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.
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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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