The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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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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There is a place where time stands still.
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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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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?
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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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.
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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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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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
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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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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
ALAN LIGHTMAN