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 LIGHTMANTo that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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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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In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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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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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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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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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
ALAN LIGHTMAN






