Quotes from Ted Chiang

Sometimes even bad advice can point a man in the right direction.

Their nonchalant cruelty, their instinctive ability to locate the weaknesses in a victim's emotional armor, the way their own friendships were reinforced by their sadism: he recognized these as examples of human behavior, not divine.

he'd always assumed his destination was Hell, and he accepted that. That was the way of things, and Hell, after all, was not physically worse than the mortal plane.

It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past.

Milliseconds pass. My death passes before my eyes.

What distinguishes the heptapods' mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history's events; it is also that their motives coincide with history's purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. When

it's easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us.

In this way Hassan lived the happiest of lives until he was overtaken by death, breaker of ties and destroyer of delights.

The economy goes into a recession after the latest flu pandemic, prompting changes in the virtual worlds.

Si nuestras vidas son cuentos que cuenta Alá, entonces somos la audiencia y los protagonistas al mismo tiempo, y es a fuerza de vivir esos cuentos como recibimos nuestras enseñanzas.

Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don't matter.

Lord, perhaps you don't hear my prayers. But I've never prayed with the expectation that it would affect your actions; I prayed with the expectation that it would affect mine.

But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, "I know I'm not perfect. I've made mistakes." I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you'll find out.

their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.

Is it more respectful to treat him like a human being, or to accept that he isn't one?

Is it better for Marco to have his brain chemistry altered than for Ana to alter hers?

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. Which is why, even when we've experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives:

A proof that mathematics is inconsistent, and that all its wondrous beauty was just an illusion, would, it seemed to me, be one of the worst things you could ever learn.

And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events: by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.

actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I've told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.

For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky. —

But I guess he has a point about how good-looking people are in commercials versus in real life. It's not that they look better than people in real life, but they look good in a different way.

The year following Blue Gamma's closure involves many changes for Derek.