Quotes from Greg Egan

Either way, I'd brought a pair of hands and enough general surgical experience to be useful. If you'd ever had be a saint to heal someone, medicine would have been doomed from the start.

Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It's perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I'm not stuck on any one thing forever; however much you think I'm wasting my time, it's only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run?

I've never believed in wormholes," Fatima confessed. "Take two in relative motion and you've got a time machine. And I definitely don't believe in time machines." -"Maybe you can believe in just one wormhole at a time," Gabrielle replied, deadpan.

Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become.

I don't believe their minds were so different from ours that we're in danger of wildly misinterpreting anything that looks like a simple message. So far, the worst mistake we could have made would have been to give up too soon on trying to interpret the isotopes.

I mean, there's got to be an art to expounding the virtues of logical positivism while garrotting Nazis with piano wire, and it looks as if Jarrod started missing their special flair.

walked a few paces away from her, then turned his whole body towards the south; in this flat desert, it wasn't impractical to triple his axial span. He

Please don't tell me it was a double bluff ... Of all the even-numbered bluffs, the less-famous 'zero bluff' cancels itself out just as thoroughly, while attracting even less attention.

Don't worry: there's nothing you can do to rob me of my healthy respect for the possibility that your incompetence will kill me.

Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this would could inflict.

Yatima's mind was reeling. The Transmuters hadn't indulged in any of the spectacular acts of astrophysical monument-building that a bored and powerful civilization might have gone in for: no planet-sculpting, no Dyson spheres, no black-hole juggling. But by tailoring a few neutrons on this obscure planet, they'd hitched the entire universe into synch with the time stream of an unimaginably larger structure.

Taken together, the artifacts comprised a giant sculpture, spanning more than a quadrillion dimensions. The Transmuters had built a structure that dwarfed universes, but touched each one only lightly. They hadn't turned whole worlds to rubble, they hadn't reshaped galaxies in their image. Having evolved on some distant, finite world, they'd inherited the most valuable survival trait of all. Restraint.

It wasn't fate, it wasn't destiny–there was no Will of God, no Force of History to absolve us. It grew out of who we were: the lies we'd told, and would keep on telling.

As for the stars, they were never ours to lose; the truth is, we've lost nothing but the illusion of their proximity.

There are times when it's worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is

History can't harm you; the "chance" of having survived the last x minutes is one hundred per cent, once you've done it. As the unknowable future becomes the unchangeable past, risk must collapse into certainty, one way or another.

The reason there was no name for such distant relatives was because sane people would have no interest in distinguishing them from anyone else. "Once

And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.

Free will is a rationalisation; I can't help making all the right decisions. And all the wrong ones.

You cannot see the future. You cannot change the past. All of life consists of running into darkness.

What would Tullia have done?

Whoever first gains the power to impose their own view decides the issue? Isn't that the definition of barbarism?

the knot of their interdependencies grew, until marriage began to seem far simpler than disentanglement, and, once accepted, almost as natural as puberty or death.

Emma smiled thinly. "The pills say wake up, and we wake up. We won't ever fall asleep at the wrong time again. But it's like being an animal in a factory farm, pushed along between the rails, going wherever you want us to go.