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Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Time
Ahead
Structure
Behinds
Behind
Future
Past
Extending
Wells
Rigid
Well
Infinitely

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
Alan Lightman
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
Alan Lightman
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
Alan Lightman
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With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
Alan Lightman
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
Alan Lightman
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A world with one month is a world of equality.
Alan Lightman
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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
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
Alan Lightman
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.
Alan Lightman
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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].
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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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
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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
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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
Alan Lightman
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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, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
Alan Lightman
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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?
Alan Lightman
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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
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
Alan Lightman
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Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
Alan Lightman
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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