Quotes from Ted Chiang

I knew it was foolhardy; men of experience say, "Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,

At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight... For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say.

It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one's body is a mental activity.

Sex isn't what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is.

Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully.

through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.'

T]hey gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged for forgiveness for their desire to see more.

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.

True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love,

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you'll always be further along than I expect.

The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it's disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it's ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It's only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all.

The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in" "Fermat's principle sounds weird because it describes light's behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: "Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.

In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove "1 + 1 = 2.

In most cases we have to forget a little bit before we can forgive; when we no longer experience the pain as fresh, the insult is easier to forgive, which in turn makes it less memorable, and so on. It's this psychological feedback loop that makes initially infuriating offenses seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.

When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.

Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are.

Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

The familiar was far away, while the bizarre was close at hand.

If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things?

For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.

Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you'll always be further along that I expect.