Quotes by Greg Egan

“It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, ...”

“In the nineteen sixties and seventies, there were people in all the democratic countries who didnt have any real power, and they started going to the people who did have all the power and saying, A...”

“How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?""That depends.""On what?""On how I want to feel.”

“They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.”

“There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.”

“Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to conquer Earth, to steal their precious physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of competitionas if a species capable of making the jou...”

“A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business Schoolfound that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annualincome. -- from "Eugene”

“Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed,...”

“And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious...”

“I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into ...”

“Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo...”

“We have a special name, here, for a certain kind of failure to defer to the greater goodfor putting a personal sense of doing right above any objective measure of the outcome. Its called moral vanity.”

“Who exactly am I saving from shame, when Ill live and die in every possible way?”

“Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.”

“Hows work? Martin asked. Behrouz was now a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which these days seemed to mean as much video journalism as prose. Not bad. Behrouz smiled slightly. Business p...”

“Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it feel from the sky, fully formed,...”

“How does it feel to be seven thousand years old?""That depends.""On what?""On how I want to feel.”

“I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into ...”

“Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’…as if a species capable of making ...”

“Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I’ll live and die in every possible way?”