Alan Lightman Quotes, Book Quotes, Writing Quotes

One day I'm going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do....is to watch these birds.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes

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. The mother and father osprey stay together. It's a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children. They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter - the mother and father.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Summer Quotes , Mother Quotes

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. 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. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Science Quotes , Cosmos Quotes

My second novel, "Good Benito", was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Years Quotes , Another Year Quotes

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Circles Quotes , Bending Quotes

I wouldn't overall say that "The Diagnosis" is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It's a modern tragedy.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Tragedy Quotes

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Principles Quotes , Fundamentals Quotes

I should have written books instead of reading them.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Reading Quotes

We've lost our way, we have lost our centeredness. We don't have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what's important. I would bet most people don't have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don't have to be sitting, they can be walking.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People Quotes

Oh, love is very much a physical thing.... I realize that it's very complicated, and I'm sure it can't be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it's very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Love Is Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Men Quotes , Desert Quotes

The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Moving Quotes , World Quotes

Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Clarity Quotes

In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , End Of The World Quotes , World Quotes

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Writing Quotes , Magic Realism Quotes

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Fiction Quotes , Jay Gould Quotes

I consider myself a spiritual atheist. 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.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Atheist Quotes

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Moving Quotes , Issues Quotes

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Ocean Quotes , Rain Quotes

Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Past Quotes , Order Quotes