In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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No one ever expects poetry to sell…
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.
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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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Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.
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There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
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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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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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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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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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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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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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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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Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.
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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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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
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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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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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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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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN