One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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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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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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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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.
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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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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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 think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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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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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
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Oh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
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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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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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I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country… people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.
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I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
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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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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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