1245: Ann Druyan
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/28
1977
“Ramona wasn’t at home anywhere. She felt like a spy in life and the ending of every great book and each orgasm, and the sight of every homeless shopping bag lady infected her with a titanic yearning for the world to make an unscheduled stop.”
“I thought, well, what if I could include the brain waves of a person in love? So I volunteered to have my brain waves recorded.”
1997
“It always amazes me that you have these $200 million movie budgets, and nobody hires a grad student to check the script to see if the science is right.”
2003
“It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life’s preciousness on our tiny planet.”
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.”
2014
“I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It’s a shame that science hasn’t been taught that way, in a long time. It’s usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion.”
“The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.”
2020
“A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter — to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness.”
“Science, like love, is a means to that transcendence, to that soaring experience of the oneness of being fully alive. The scientific approach to nature and my understanding of love are the same: Love asks us to get beyond the infantile projections of our personal hopes and fears, to embrace the other’s reality.”
2025
“You, the farthest objects we have ever touched, now venture beyond that place where the sun’s wind gives way to roaring interstellar gales; far, far away — and yet I feel close to you.”
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