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.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn 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.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
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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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In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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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.
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It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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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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Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN