One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
ALAN LIGHTMANI’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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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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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
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As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
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For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
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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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All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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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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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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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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I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.
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If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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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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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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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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