In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
ALAN LIGHTMANDespite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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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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And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.
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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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It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
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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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In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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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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As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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