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.
ALAN LIGHTMANThere 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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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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My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.
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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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When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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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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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.
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To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
ALAN LIGHTMAN