I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.
Tags: time, self, science, memory, identify

Other Quotes by "Carlo Rovelli"

Undistracted by schooling, one studies best during vacations
Tags: wisdom, vacations, studying, study, school, education
Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution which our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made. Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past which haunts us and serenity.
Tags: science, reality, nature, humanity, emotions
We are a species which is naturally moved by curiosity, the only one left of a group of species (the genus Homo) made up of a dozen equally curious species. The other species in the group have already become extinct; some, like the Neanderthals, quite recently, roughly thirty thousand years ago. It is group of species which evolved in Africa, akin to the hierarchical and quarrelsome chimpanzees -- and even more closely akin to the bonobos, the small, peaceful, cheerfully egalitarian and promiscuous type of chimps. A group of species which repeatedly went out of Africa in order to explore new worlds, and went far: as far, eventually, as Patagonia -- and as far, eventually, as the moon. It is not against our nature to be curious: it is in our nature to be so.
Tags: science, humanity, human-nature, human-evolution, exploration, evolution, curiosity, bonobos
But what we see and understand of the universe is not an infinity to drown in. It is a wide sea, but a finite one.
Tags: science
Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or fore being determined by the evolution that our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real.
Tags: science
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