I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
ALAN LIGHTMANI have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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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 have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
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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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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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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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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 world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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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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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
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A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?
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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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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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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
ALAN LIGHTMAN