I value my correspondence with writers…
ALAN LIGHTMANOr perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.
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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
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Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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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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Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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Such 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].
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We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.
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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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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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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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I believe that we need to slow down.
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