Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMANThat 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.
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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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All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return?
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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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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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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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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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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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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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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.
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