Quote

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?

Alan Lightman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Back
Clouds
Person
Rain
Without
Ocean
Love
Pure
Replenishing
Like
Possible
Evaporating
Nature
Reciprocity
Anything
Oceans
Persons
Wanting

More quotes by Alan Lightman

Image
As a scientist, I don't believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
Alan Lightman
Image
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.
Alan Lightman
Image
Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
Alan Lightman
Image
I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration. A book, especially a longer book, it's a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It's a vision of the whole thing.
Alan Lightman
Image
Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.
Alan Lightman
Image
I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.
Alan Lightman
Image
The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
Alan Lightman
Image
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
Alan Lightman
Image
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.
Alan Lightman
Image
I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country... people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.
Alan Lightman
Image
I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
Alan Lightman
Image
The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
Alan Lightman
Image
I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
Alan Lightman
Image
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.
Alan Lightman
Image
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
Alan Lightman
Image
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.
Alan Lightman
Image
I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that. It is true that the arts at MIT don't have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
Alan Lightman
Image
I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics. The great ideas in science, like the Cro-Magnon paintings and the plays of Shakespeare, are part of our cultural heritage.
Alan Lightman
Image
Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn't care one whit about us. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
Alan Lightman
Image
Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.
Alan Lightman