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.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe 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.
ALAN LIGHTMANIf a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
ALAN LIGHTMANA world with one month is a world of equality.
ALAN LIGHTMANAs long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
ALAN LIGHTMANEvery reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMANRather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
ALAN LIGHTMANSuch 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 LIGHTMANHuman beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
ALAN LIGHTMANI think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
ALAN LIGHTMANSons 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.
ALAN LIGHTMANThat 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,
ALAN LIGHTMANWhile people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMANThere are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.
ALAN LIGHTMAN“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
ALAN LIGHTMANI certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
ALAN LIGHTMAN