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.
ALAN LIGHTMANI think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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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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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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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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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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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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