Quotes from Ted Chiang

Ciò che doveva risultare familiare era remoto, e quel che avrebbe dovuto essere estraneo sembrava invece a portata di mano.

If your ultimate goal in loving God was a reunion with your spouse, you weren't demonstrating true devotion at all.

Vivere con te sarà come mirare a un bersaglio in movimento. Sarai sempre un po' più in là di dove mi aspetto che tu sia.

Pur non cascando nella trappola d'incolpare Dio, non fece mai quel passo che l'avrebbe portato ad amarlo.

The proof of Euclidean geometry's consistency eluded mathematicians. By the end of the nineteenth century, the best that was achieved was a proof that Euclidean geometry was consistent as long as arithmetic was consistent.

during the party he saw her smile twice and frown once; at those moments, her entire countenance assumed the expression as if it had never known another.

Carl had been caught by surprise: he could recognize a face that smiled regularly, or a face that frowned regularly, even if it were unlined. He was curious as to how her face had developed such a close familiarity with so many expressions, and yet normally revealed nothing.

in 1900, David Hilbert listed what he considered to be the twenty-three most important unsolved problems of mathematics. The second item on his list was a request for a proof of the consistency of arithmetic. Such a proof would ensure the consistency of a great deal of higher mathematics. What this proof had to guarantee was, in essence, that one could never prove one equals two. Few mathematicians regarded this as a matter of much import.

He understood how life was an undeserved bounty, how even the most virtuous were not worthy of the glories of the mortal plane.

Hilbert once said, "If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

A dog may understand dozens of commands, but it will never do anything but bark.

The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one's eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.

The tendency towards equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes.

Feminism would have us apologize for having that reaction. It wants to replace aesthetics with politics, and to the extent it's succeeded, it's impoverished us.

That's right. Arithmetic as a formal system is inconsistent.

The original Drayta's owner trained him using a puzzle generator pirated from the Five Dynasties continent on the Real Space platform and then released copies to the public domain.

Technology is being used to manipulate us through our emotional reactions, so it's only fair that we use it to protect ourselves too.

infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering.

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact.

Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent. That was something that frightened her: the possibility that she was losing her mind. She was certainly losing her clarity of thought, and that came pretty close.

So much of mathematics had no practical application; it existed solely as a formal theory, studied for its intellectual beauty. But that couldn't last; a self-contradictory theory was so pointless that most mathematicians would drop it in disgust. What truly infuriated Renee was the way her own intuition had betrayed her. The damned theorem made sense; in its own perverted way, it felt right. She understood it, knew why it was true, believed it.

I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily.

Science is not just the search for the truth," he said. "It's the search for purpose." And I had no response. I had always assumed those were one and the same, but what if they aren't? I don't know what to think now. It frightens me to imagine that you have never been listening at all.

In public Neil was able to mask his grief as adults are expected to, but in the privacy of his apartment, the floodgates of emotion burst open.