Quotes from Greg Egan

Isn't there a level where both sides can still cooperate?

A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust...or it doesn't. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole...or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods .

We'll shape them through their memes," he said. "We'll kill off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed.

You needed someone to vent to, and I had enough distance from it that it didn't weigh me down. I could commiserate and walk away.

The wonderful thing about hope is that it has absolutely no effect on anything. Just throw the switch.

Seven genders – and all of them perceived as monolithic. Everyone stereotyped at a glance. Seven pigeon-holes instead of two isn't progress.

I shake my head, horrified. "How can you say that? We've stayed free. We've struggled so hard to stay free." She shrugs. "Maybe. Or maybe we've been captured by what you call freedom.

Haven't you heard of Occam's Razor: once you have a perfectly simple explanation for something, you don't go looking for ever more complicated ways of explaining the very same thing?

I have no strength now to speak of my loss of strength.

Durham said, "Do you know what a Garden-of-Eden configuration is?" Maria was caught blank for a second, then she said, "Yes, of course. In cellular automaton theory, it's a state of the system that can't be the result of any previous state. No other pattern of cells can give rise to it. If you want a Garden-of-Eden configuration, you have to start with it – you have to put it in by hand as the system's first state.

JSN regrets to advise you that your resources have been diverted to a higher bidder. A snapshot of your task has been preserved in mass storage, and will be available to you when you next log on. Thank you for using our services.

gaze down at the dusty top surface of the bank of lights suspended from the ceiling of the operating theater. There's a neatly hand-lettered sticker on the gray-painted metal – slightly yellowing, the writing a little faded, peeling at one corner. It reads:   IN CASE OF OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE PHONE 137 4597

But what if a large part of your business consists of selling things that put people out of work. Including many of the people who actually pay for the things you're trying to sell.

All an organism could do from day to day was shore itself up in some rough semblance of its previous condition. The same was true, from moment to moment, for the state of the whole universe. By one means or another, everyone was an imperfect imitation

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round.

Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to 'conquer' Earth, to steal their 'precious' physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of 'competition'…as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Is a stranger in a crowd less than human, just because you can't witness her inner life?

All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.

How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?" "That depends." "On what?" "On how I want to feel.

I said, 'The truth is whatever you can get away with.' 'No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape.

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit—preferably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.

You'll never stop changing, but that doesn't mean you have to drift in the wind. Every day, you can take the person you've been, and the new things you've witnessed, and make your own, honest choice as to who you should become. "Whatever happens, you can always be true to yourself. But don't expect to end up with the same inner compass as anyone else. Not unless they started beside you, and climbed beside you every step of the way.

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: Music for Leaving Airports 11 June 2008.