Alan Townsend > Quotes

“perhaps there is no purer form of love than science. It is an act of profound attention and empathy. It requires a willingness to come back and back and back to a problem, no matter how numerous or embarrassing your failures, in the quest for a solution. Science is the discipline of figuring out the things one can change and learning how to work with the things one can't.”
― Alan Townsend, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder

“I looked at Mount Neva and thought about how for me, Diana had brought a new twist to our lives being just tiny blips in the grand arc of time. She reminded me that while our flashes may be brief, some of them are impossibly bright, and everything that matters is contained in the ways your own light sparks the ones that lie in everybody else.”
― Alan Townsend, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder

“Science, though, tells us–hell, it tries to hammer home–that correlation is not causation. Which in turn lets us see that two souls can be correlative in life, can suffer alongside each other, without one having caused the suffering of the other. In this, we find both the limits of science–we can't control everything–and also the mercy: we don't cause everything.”
― Alan Townsend, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder

“But like that butterfly, science teaches you that a moment of contraction and chaos—a time when everything seems to be falling apart—is probably temporary. That something surprising and wonderful might lie ahead. You just have to keep yourself in the position to find”
― Alan Townsend, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder

“To keep growing in one place, we must destroy growth somewhere else, and we have accelerated that destruction right off the charts. But we've become enormously skilled at hiding that reality, thereby allowing us to keep pretending all that growth can simply keep going. That it should remain the organizing goal for each of our lives. This is our dominant story.”
― Alan Townsend, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder

“The images of Earth's oscillations soothed me. Maybe it's okay to lie down for a bit, I thought. Because when I do, hopefully I'll know I'm already starting to stand back up.

Except I didn't lie down. I fell.”
― Alan Townsend, This Ordinary Stardust: A Scientist's Path from Grief to Wonder