The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy.
ALAN LIGHTMANOne metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
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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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To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.
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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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Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
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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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Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
ALAN LIGHTMAN