Quotes by Ted Chiang

“I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step...”

“Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.”

“The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.”

“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's importan...”

“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 ...”

“And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time youll be playing with the neighbors puppy, poking your hands through the chain-link fence separating our back yards, and youl...”

“...you couldn't ask a person to remain supportive through any crisis. If a man's wife were suddenly afflicted with a mental illness, it would be a sin for him to leave her, but a forgivable one. To...”

“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”

“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-ori...”

“The hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.”

“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 tha...”

“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 mome...”

“When you watch Olympic athletes in competition, does your self-esteem plummet? Of course not. On the contrary, you feel wonder and admiration; you're inspired that such exceptional individuals exis...”

“We dont normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as...”

“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 ...”

“What I'll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won't be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won't be someone I could have ...”

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”

“I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods' worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as the must, instead of merely w...”

“When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.”

“From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?”