Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
ALAN LIGHTMANI oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
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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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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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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
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The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
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And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
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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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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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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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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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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
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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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In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
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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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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.
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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, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
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