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.
ALAN LIGHTMANScientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.
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There is a place where time stands still.
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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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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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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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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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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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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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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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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.
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