Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
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It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
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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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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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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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Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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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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Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
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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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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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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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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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Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN