Top 63 Ted Chiang Quotes
#1. Living with you will be like
aiming for a moving target; you'll always be further along than I expect.
Ted Chiang
#2. In this way Hassan lived the happiest of lives until he was overtaken by death, breaker of ties and destroyer of delights.
Ted Chiang
#3. 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 casual and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.
Ted Chiang
#4. The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.
Ted Chiang
#5. I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.
Ted Chiang
#6. Unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned.
Ted Chiang
#7. save our emotional responses for real life.
Ted Chiang
#8. There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.
Ted Chiang
#9. She, like many, had always thought that mathematics did not derive its meaning from the universe, but rather imposed some meaning onto the universe. Physical
Ted Chiang
#10. Hrough 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.
Ted Chiang
#11. 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.
Ted Chiang
#12. Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
Ted Chiang
#13. 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.
Ted Chiang
#14. He considers intelligence to be a means, while I view it as an end in itself.
Ted Chiang
#15. 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 created by myself.
Ted Chiang
#16. 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?
Ted Chiang
#17. When I was a kid, I figured I would be a physicist when I grew up, and then I would write science fiction on the side. The physicist thing didn't pan out, but writing science fiction on the side did.
Ted Chiang
#18. Perhaps the only permanent solution would be a more liberal Parliament, but it is beyond my expertise to suggest how we might bring that about.
Ted Chiang
#19. Their devotion had never been put to any serious test, and might not have withstood one; their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.
Ted Chiang
#20. Well if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?"
" 'Cause I wanna hear it!
Ted Chiang
#21. Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don't matter. There's no technological shortcut. Adesh
Ted Chiang
#22. [T]hey gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged for forgiveness for their desire to see more.
Ted Chiang
#23. Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism.
Ted Chiang
#24. The familiar was far away, while the bizarre was close at hand.
Ted Chiang
#25. The universe began as an enormous breath being held. I am glad that it did ... until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.
Ted Chiang
#26. Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.
Ted Chiang
#27. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.
Ted Chiang
#28. 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.
Ted Chiang
#29. 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. And
Ted Chiang
#30. My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn't be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole.
Ted Chiang
#31. 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.
Ted Chiang
#32. Hillalum wondered what sort of people were forged by living under such conditions; did they escape madness? Did they grow accustomed to this? Would the children born under a solid sky scream if they saw the ground beneath their feet?
Ted Chiang
#33. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity.
Ted Chiang
#34. Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.
Ted Chiang
#35. I concede his greater ingenuity. It bodes well for his endeavor. Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism. I wonder what he intends to do after he's saved the world. I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve.
Ted Chiang
#36. True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love,
Ted Chiang
#37. 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.
Ted Chiang
#38. It's funny: when you're tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I'd insist that they include the halo. But when you're unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.
Ted Chiang
#39. I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.
Ted Chiang
#40. People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.
Ted Chiang
#41. 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.
Ted Chiang
#42. Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment
Ted Chiang
#43. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky. After
Ted Chiang
#44. If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things?
Ted Chiang
#45. 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 exist. So why can't we feels the same way about beauty?
Ted Chiang
#46. when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation. And God sent him to Hell anyway. Ethan
Ted Chiang
#47. Experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Ted Chiang
#48. What Gentzen had done was prove the obvious by assuming the doubtful.
Ted Chiang
#49. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.
Ted Chiang
#50. The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy. Carl
Ted Chiang
#51. Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent.
Ted Chiang
#52. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh's work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh's work was indicated, and Yahweh's work was concealed.
Ted Chiang
#53. Sometimes, it's good to wait. The anticipation makes it more fun when you get there.
Ted Chiang
#54. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.
Ted Chiang
#55. You'll do what makes you happy, and that'll be all I ask for.
Ted Chiang
#56. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each
Ted Chiang
#57. He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener.
Ted Chiang
#58. We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology.
Ted Chiang
#59. Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say.
Ted Chiang
#60. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.
Ted Chiang
#61. Probably the most formative experience was reading the 'Foundation' trilogy when I was about twelve years old. That wasn't the first science fiction I had ever read, but it's something that stands out in my memory as having had a big impact on me.
Ted Chiang
#62. 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 wading in its surf for the rest of my life.
Ted Chiang
#63. It is no coincidence that "aspiration" means both hope and the act of breathing.
Ted Chiang
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