Quotes from Ted Chiang

I can't believe that you, a grown woman taller than me and beautiful enough to make my heart ache, will be the same girl I used to lift off the ground so you could reach the drinking fountain, the same girl who used to trundle out of my bedroom draped in a dress and hat and four scarves from my closet.

And God sent him to Hell anyway.

People are nice to me because of how I like, and part of me likes that, but part of me feels guilty because I haven't done anything to deserve it.

I remember when you'll be a month old, and I'll stumble out of bed to give you your 2:00 a.m. feeding.

I'm reminded of the Confucian concept of ren: inadequately conveyed by "benevolence," that quality which is quintessentially human, which can only be cultivated through interaction with others, and which a solitary person cannot manifest.

Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even when you work at it, you're working at being passive.

I would be honored to relate everything I know of the future, if Your Majesty sees fit to ask, but for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this: Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.

I view the world as incidental to my aims, while he cannot allow someone with enhanced intelligence to work purely in self-interest.

True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love, and that's something that nothing can obscure.

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

Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our natures? And that, you have to agree, is a profound question.

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

save our emotional responses for real life.

When Kokwa told the story, he didn't merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.

It's no coincidence that "aspiration" means both hope and the act of breathing. 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.

I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity.

He considers intelligence to be a means, while I view it as an end in itself.

On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer's feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.

Our language has two words for what in your language is called 'true.' There is what's right, mimi, and what's precise, vough. In a dispute the principals say what they consider right; they speak mimi. The witnesses, however, are sworn to say precisely what happened; they speak vough. When Sabe has heard what happened he can decide what action is mimi for everyone. But it's not lying if the principals don't speak vough, as long as they speak mimi.

The years she spent raising Jax didn't just make him fun to talk to, didn't just provide him with hobbies and a sense of humor. They were what gave him all the attributes Exponential is looking for: fluency at navigating the real world, creativity at solving new problems, judgment you could entrust with an important decision. Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience

Nada borra el pasado. Existe el arrepentimiento, existe la enmienda, y existe el perdón. No hay más, pero con eso basta.

When Janice had spoken of the strength she had as an afflicted person, her message was rare, but now that she's eyeless, her message is commonplace.

By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that's needed for forgiveness to begin.