Quotes from Ted Chiang

and Hell, after all, was not physically worse than the mortal plane.

It was something I thought of when I was talking with my sister," he says. Derek's sister teaches children born with Down syndrome. "She mentioned that some parents don't want to push their kids too much, because they're afraid of exposing them to the possibility of failure. The parents mean well, but they're keeping their kids from reaching their full potential when they coddle them.

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that.

For me, thinking typically meant speaking in an internal voice; as we say in the trade, my thoughts were phonologically coded.

Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn't if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate. ·

I remembered that argument as being a turning point for me. I had imagined a narrative of redemption and self-improvement in which I was the heroic single father, rising to meet the challenge. But the reality was…what? How much of what had happened since then could I take credit for?

Like physical events with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.

movies always depict love in terms of grand romantic gestures when, over the long term, love also means working through money problems and picking dirty laundry off the floor.

Men as righteous as we could not be judged harshly.

While each of us must find our own way forward through this forest of doubt, it is only with the support of others that we'll be able to do so.

You see, the foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated. But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul. These old conflicting impulses are rearing their heads again, this time in the calliagnosia debate.

If those scientists could come up with some way to turn off the jerk circuit in guys' brains, I'd be all in favor of that.

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

But the only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing.

Men are no different from your automata; slip a bloke a piece of paper with the proper figures on it, and he'll do your bidding.

He tells people that they can no more expect justice in the afterlife than in the mortal plane, but he doesn't do this to dissuade them from worshipping God; on the contrary, he encourages them to do so. What he insists on is that they not love God under a misapprehension, that if they wish to love God, they be prepared to do so no matter His intentions. God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.

They're blind to a simple truth: complex minds can't develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don't grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.

And then, our universe will be in a state of absolute equilibrium. All life and thought will cease and, with them, time itself.

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.

Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience.

Beauty is the promise of happiness."—Stendhal

what is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?

I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range.

Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.