Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ted Chiang Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 89 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ted Chiang.

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Famous Quotes By Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 875043

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

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We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 2065208

The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one's thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice. With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren't expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind's eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane. As — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 1225630

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 didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal? — Ted Chiang

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If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you change things? — Ted Chiang

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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

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The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. 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. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artificially generating spherically symmetric gravity fields. Having — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 1248807

Women who work with animals hear this all the time: that their love for animals must arise out of a sublimated child-rearing urge. Ana's tired of the stereotype. She likes children just fine, but they're not the standard against which all other accomplishments should be measured. Caring for animals is worthwhile in and of itself, a vocation that need offer no apologies. — Ted Chiang

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Sometimes, it's good to wait. The anticipation makes it more fun when you get there. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 966072

True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love, — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 168327

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

Ted Chiang Quotes 1324517

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 important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 515743

In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove 1 + 1 = 2. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 923937

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

Ted Chiang Quotes 1769302

Many minutes pass. I learn much from him, and he from me. It's exhilarating, to be suddenly awash in ideas whose implications would take me days to consider fully. But we're also gathering strategic information: I infer the extent of his unspoken knowledge, compare it with my own, and simulate his corresponding inferences. For there is always the awareness that this must come to an end; the formulation of our exchanges renders ideological differences luminously clear. Reynolds hasn't witnessed the beauty that I have; he's stood before lovely insights, oblivious to them. The sole gestalt that inspires him is the one I ignored: that of the planetary society, of the biosphere. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each feels that the other has ignored great opportunities. He — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 1303034

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

Ted Chiang Quotes 375556

I've gone into the outside world to reobserve society. The sign language of emotion I once knew has been replaced by a matrix of interrelated equations. Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. 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. At — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 605492

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 that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons. — Ted Chiang

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

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It is no coincidence that "aspiration" means both hope and the act of breathing. — Ted Chiang

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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

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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

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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

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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 stay would mean accepting a different kind of relationship, something not everyone was cut out for ...
'Division by Zero — Ted Chiang

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Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment — Ted Chiang

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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

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He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener. — Ted Chiang

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The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy. Carl — Ted Chiang

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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. — Ted Chiang

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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

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Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no "correct" interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.
"Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it. — Ted Chiang

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Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there's actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. — Ted Chiang

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For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky. After — Ted Chiang

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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

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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

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I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 130653

At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will be in reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state. — Ted Chiang

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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

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Think of cocaine. In its natural form, as coca leaves, it's appealing, but not to an extent that it usually becomes a problem. But refine it, purify it, and you get a compound that hits your pleasure receptors with an unnatural intensity. That's when it becomes addictive.
Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers.Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks
call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex
and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical grade beauty, the cocaine of good looks. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 1297406

save our emotional responses for real life. — Ted Chiang

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when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation. And God sent him to Hell anyway. Ethan — Ted Chiang

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You'll do what makes you happy, and that'll be all I ask for. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 1576324

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 moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight ... For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 1641995

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

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The familiar was far away, while the bizarre was close at hand. — Ted Chiang

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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

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Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say. — Ted Chiang

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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-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: "Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination. — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 1988621

No matter what I study, I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology. As I read the texts, I can think only that the authors are plodding along from one point to the next, groping for connections that they can't see. They're like a crowd of people unable to read music, peering at the score for a Bach sonata, trying to explain how one note leads to another. As glorious as these patterns are, they also whet my appetite for more. There are other patterns waiting to be discovered, gestalts of another scale entirely. With respect to those, I'm blind myself; all my sonatas are just isolated data points by comparison. I have no idea what form such gestalts might assume, but that'll come in time. I want to find them, and comprehend them. I want this more than anything I've ever wanted before. The — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 2063599

And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time you'll be playing with the neighbor's puppy, poking your hands through the chain-link fence separating our back yards, and you'll be laughing so hard you'll start hiccupping. The puppy will run inside the neighbor's house, and your laughter will gradually subside, letting you catch your breath. Then the puppy will come back to the fence to lick your fingers again, and you'll shriek and start laughing again. It will be the most wonderful sound I could ever imagine, a sound that makes me feel like a fountain, or a wellspring. — Ted Chiang

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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

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Experience is algorithmically incompressible. — Ted Chiang

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In this way Hassan lived the happiest of lives until he was overtaken by death, breaker of ties and destroyer of delights. — Ted Chiang

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Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough. — Ted Chiang

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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

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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

Ted Chiang Quotes 583669

And then it came to him: a seal cylinder. When rolled upon a tablet of soft clay, the carved cylinder left an imprint that formed a picture. Two figures might appear at opposite ends of the tablet, though they stood side by side on the surface of the cylinder. All the world was as such a cylinder. Men imagined heaven and earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched. It — Ted Chiang

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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

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Living with you will be like
aiming for a moving target; you'll always be further along than I expect. — Ted Chiang

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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

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Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not. Even worse, some girls get the message that they can get through life relying on just their looks, and then they never develop their minds. [ ... ]
Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even what you work at it, you're working at being passive. — Ted Chiang

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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. — Ted Chiang

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Maturity means seeing the differences, but realizing they don't matter. There's no technological shortcut. Adesh — Ted Chiang

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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

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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

Ted Chiang Quotes 181741

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

Ted Chiang Quotes 141356

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

Ted Chiang Quotes 138617

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

Ted Chiang Quotes 135805

Nathanael hadn't delivered any specific message; the angel's parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. Sixty-two people received medical treatment for injuries ranging from slight concussions to ruptured eardrums to burns requiring skin grafts. Total property damage was estimated at $8.1 million, all of it excluded by private insurance companies due to the cause. Scores of people became devout worshipers in the wake of the visitation, either out of gratitude or terror. Alas, — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 134292

Carl had met Renee at a party given by a colleague of his. He had been taken with her face. Hers was a remarkably plain face, and it appeared quite somber most of the time, but during the party he saw her smile twice and frown once; at those moments, her entire countenance assumed the expression as if it had never known another. Carl had been caught by surprise: he could recognize a face that smiled regularly, or a face that frowned regularly, even if it were unlined. He was curious as to how her face had developed such a close familiarity with so many expressions, and yet normally revealed nothing. It took a long time for him to understand Renee, to read her expressions. But it had definitely been worthwhile. Now — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 103698

I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 81168

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, — Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang Quotes 992668

Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism. — Ted Chiang

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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

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Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity. — Ted Chiang

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There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. — Ted Chiang

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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

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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

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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

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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

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[T]hey gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much, and begged for forgiveness for their desire to see more. — Ted Chiang

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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

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Unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned. — Ted Chiang

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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

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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

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

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Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. 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. I — Ted Chiang

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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

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Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. — Ted Chiang