Quotes from Ted Chiang

My species probably won't be here for much longer; it's likely that we'll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it. The message is this: You be good. I love you.

But faces that are full of personality look as good as they ever did, maybe even better. It's like you're seeing something more essential about them.

Porque todos nos hemos equivocado en diversas ocasiones, hemos actuado con crueldad e hipocresía, y todos hemos olvidado la mayoría de esas ocasiones. Y eso significa que en realidad no nos conocemos

Por un momento no tuve claro si estaba soñando o despierto, porque me sentía como si acabase de entrar en un cuento, y la idea de que podría hablar con sus protagonistas y participar en los acontecimientos me produjo vértigo

You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks.

Perhaps men were not meant to live in such a place. If their own natures restrained them from approaching heaven too closely, then men should remain on the earth.

What Gentzen had done was prove the obvious by assuming the doubtful. 7A

The existence of free will meant that we couldn't know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Do you now understand why I say the future and the past are the same? We cannot change either, but we can know both more fully.

Some find irony in the fact that a study of our brains revealed to us not the secrets of the past but what ultimately awaits us in the future.

With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. Why constrain writing with a glottographic straitjacket, demanding that it be just as sequential as speech? It would never occur to them. Semasiographic writing naturally took advantage of the page's two-dimensionality; instead of doling out morphemes one at a time, it offered an entire page full of them all at once.

Te? tego próbowa?em. Ignorowa? rz?d w nadziei, ?e zniknie. Nie znikn??.

mean that we cannot conduct trade. We simply need to know why they're here, and what we have that they want. Once we have that information, we can begin trade negotiations. "I should emphasize

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. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.

He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener.

Sabe, who had been listening to them, chided Kokwa. "It's not your place to judge Jijingi. The hare favors one food, the hippo favors another. Let each spend his time as he pleases.

females were the source of the vital principle that gave the offspring life, while males provided the basic form. Because of this division, neither sex could reproduce by itself.

he knows he has a reward map but has never thought about what it would mean to edit it. "Might be fun editing my reward map," says Polo. "You not able edit your reward map when you working for someone else," says Marco. "You only able do that when you corporation.

Conventional languages. . . lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they're imprecise and unwieldy. They're hardly fit for speech, let alone thought.

But what happened, it was almost as if I were a theologian proving that there was no God. Not just fearing it, but knowing it for a fact. [...] It's a feeling I can't convey to you. It was something that I believed deeply, implicitly, and it's not true, and I'm the one who demonstrated it.

Penetrating computer security is really quite dull; I can see how it might attract those who can't resist a challenge to their cleverness, but it's not intellectually aesthetic at all. It's no different than tugging on the doors of a locked house until you find an improperly installed lock. A useful activity, but hardly interesting.

As all things are reflections of God, so are all names reflections of the divine name." "And what is an object's true name?" "That name which reflects the divine name in the same manner as the object reflects God." "And what is the action of a true name?" "To endow its object with a reflection of divine power.

in Nicole's mouth instead of mine?