Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
ALAN LIGHTMANI think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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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.
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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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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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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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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My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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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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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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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