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.
ALAN LIGHTMANI value my correspondence with writers…
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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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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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.
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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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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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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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I 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.
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We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
ALAN LIGHTMAN