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.
ALAN LIGHTMANI think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.
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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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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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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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There 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.
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At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.
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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
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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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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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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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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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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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