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 LIGHTMANWe often do not see what we do not expect to see.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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?
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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?
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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.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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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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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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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 are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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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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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.
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
ALAN LIGHTMAN