Quotes from Ted Chiang

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

since I already know it would work, and it wouldn't illuminate any new gestalts.

M]any people are so quick to classify events as miraculous that it devalues the word.

He became an adult who—like so many others—viewed God's actions in the abstract until they impinged upon his own life.

1 Dividing a number by zero doesn't produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally "undefined.

Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways . . . Likely to linger in the memory the way riddles may linger—teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling.' Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker

Control over my body continues to grow. By now I could walk on hot coals or stick needles in my arm, if I were so inclined. However, my interest in Eastern meditation is limited to its application to physical control; no meditative trance I can attain is nearly as desirable to me as my mental state when I assemble gestalts out of elemental data.

You will inhale Exhalation in a single, stunned sitting, because true genius doesn't come along nearly as often as advertised.' Blake Crouch

I had obviously been a much worse father fourteen years ago than I'd thought; it would be tempting to conclude I had come further to reach where I currently was, but I couldn't trust my perceptions anymore. Did Nicole even have positive feelings about me now? I wasn't going to try using Remem to answer this question; I needed to go to the source.

With my near-total recall and my ability to correlate, I can assess a situation immediately, and choose the best course of action for my purposes; I'm never indecisive. Only theoretical topics pose a challenge.

Well if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you' 'Cause I wanna hear it!

writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.

it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

Moseby explained to Jijingi how each sound a person spoke could be indicated with a different mark on the paper. The marks were arranged in rows like plants in a field; you looked at the marks as if you were walking down a row, made the sound each mark indicated, and you would find yourself speaking what the original person had said. Moseby showed him how to make each of the different marks on a sheet of paper, using a tiny wooden rod that had a core of soot.

The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

unspeakable horrors loom all around me, scenes not of physical violence but of psychic mutilation. Mental agony and orgasm. Terror and hysterical laughter.

Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person's mouth hadn't changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn't known it until now.

Aquéllos que han leído el Libro del tiempo nunca lo admiten

The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.

But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments

Neil even knows that by being beyond God's awareness, he is not loved by God in return. This doesn't affect his feelings either, because unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned. And though it's been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still. That is the nature of true devotion.

There's a joke that I once heard a comedienne tell. It goes like this: "I'm not sure if I'm ready to have children. I asked a friend of mine who has children, 'Suppose I do have kids. What if when they grow up, they blame me for everything that's wrong with their lives?' She laughed and said, 'What do you mean, if?' " That's my favorite joke.

if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.