Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
ALAN LIGHTMANIs 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?
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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“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.
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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
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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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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
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He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?
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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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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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Every essay – the subject matter of every essay – is ultimately about the essayist; him or herself. That ultimately, every essayist is writing about his or her view of the world.
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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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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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Most people have learned to live in the moment.
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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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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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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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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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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.
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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
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Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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