Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMANScientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
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I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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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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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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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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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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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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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
ALAN LIGHTMAN