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.
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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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
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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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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
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We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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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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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
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I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.
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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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The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.
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If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
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With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
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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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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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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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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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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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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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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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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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