I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
ALAN LIGHTMANI 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
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What I am very disturbed about is this trend of everything happening faster and faster and faster and there being more and more general noise in the world, and less and less time for quiet reflection on who we are, and where we’re going.
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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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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We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.
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It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
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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.
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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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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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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.
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I 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.
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It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
ALAN LIGHTMAN