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?
ALAN LIGHTMANIn short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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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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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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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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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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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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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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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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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…
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The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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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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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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.
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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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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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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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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