Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
ALAN LIGHTMANWhile people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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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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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
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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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In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons,
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Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
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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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