Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine Quotes

“Maybe the moment is all there is. Maybe I should just gather my clamshells and be quiet. The exquisite experience of joy—when I am completely consumed by a pleasurable activity such as conversation with good friends or good food or laughing with my children—is certainly one of the moment. But for some reason, I and many of my fellow travelers are not satisfied with the moment. The Now isn’t enough. We want to go beyond the moment. We want to build systems and patterns and memories that connect moment to moment to eternity. We long to be part of the Infinite.”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“As far as I know, all major religions that subscribe to a belief in God—including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—believe that the universe was created by God at a finite time in the past. The one major contemporary religious tradition that does not incorporate God, Buddhism, holds that the universe has existed for all of eternity. Looked at another way, a universe with a beginning must have had a creation, either by a divine being or by quantum physics. But a universe that has existed forever needs neither.”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“If the physical world were a novel, with the business of examining evil and good, it would not have the clear lines of Dickens but the shadowy ambiguities of Dostoevsky.”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“I am dizzy with infinity.”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“Nature,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “is what we see / The Hill—the Afternoon / Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee / Nay—Nature is Heaven.” In the last line, the poet leaps from the finite to infinity, to the realm of the Absolutes. It is almost as if Nature in her glory wants us to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial beyond nature itself. In other words, Nature tempts us to believe in the supernatural. But then again, Nature has also given us big brains, allowing us to build microscopes and telescopes and ultimately, for some of us, to conclude that it’s all just atoms and molecules. It’s a paradox.”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“Friendships hold fast for decades and then rip without warning.”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“The most profound questions seem to have this fascinating aspect: Either they have no answer at all, or all possible answers seem impossible. So, here’s one more profound question: Did anything exist before the Big Bang? Was the Big Bang the beginning of time? Or was there something before, some kind of eternal “meta-universe” that spawned our universe and possibly other universes?”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“Without ever hearing it spoken out loud, we budding scientists simply embraced a principle I call the Central Doctrine of Science: All properties and events in the physical universe are governed by laws, and those laws hold true at every time and place in the universe. Graduate”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine

“It may be that quantum physics can produce a universe from nothing, without cause, but such an accidental and unanalyzable origin for EVERYTHING seems deeply unsatisfying, at least to this pilgrim. In the absence of God, we still want causes and reasons. We still need to make sense of this strange cosmos we find ourselves in. Permanent or impermanent, absolute or relative, we still long for answers, and understanding. Evidently, science can find reasons and causes for everything in the physical universe but not for the universe itself. What caused the universe to come into being? Why is there something rather than nothing? We don’t know and will almost certainly never know. And so this most profound question, although in tightest embrace with the physical world, will likely remain in the domain of philosophy and religion.”
― Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine