I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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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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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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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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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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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
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I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
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Continents of memory had been lost.
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A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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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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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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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.
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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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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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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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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN