Home > Author > Greg Egan
101 " You know, in formal logic, an inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all. Once you have a single contradiction, A and not A, there’s nothing you can’t derive from it. "
― Greg Egan , Quarantine
102 " The whole idea of a creator tears itself apart. A universe with conscious beings either finds itself in the dust … or it doesn’t. It either makes sense of itself on its own terms, as a self-contained whole … or not at all. There never can, and never will be, Gods. "
― Greg Egan , Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2)
103 " Where was the line? Between self-transformation so great as to turn a longing for death into childlike wonder … and death itself, and the handing on of the joys and burdens he could no longer shoulder to someone new? "
104 " It was the kind of behavior that could only occur whenpeople had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at thesame sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiralingdown toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn’tneed gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity couldpin you to the ground, far more efficiently. "
― Greg Egan
105 " How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?’ ‘Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?’ ‘Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving? "
― Greg Egan , Diaspora
106 " There's nothing worse than a label to cement people's loyalties. "
― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder
107 " I was recruited by the dead,’ Zak said. ‘Not in any rush to join them in their silence, but from the urgent need to understand what they might have thought and done that could survive them, that could speak across the ages, that could be continued even now. "
― Greg Egan , Incandescence
108 " The future has always been determined. What else could affect human actions, other than each individual’s — unique and complex — inheritance and past experience? Who we are decides what we do — and what greater ‘freedom’ could anyone demand? If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain. "
― Greg Egan , Axiomatic
109 " The sense that discovering a way to breach this barrier would somehow “liberate” him was compelling – but he knew it was absurd. Even if he did find a flaw in the program which enabled him to break through, he knew he’d gain nothing but decreasingly realistic surroundings. The recording could only contain complete information for points of view within a certain, finite zone; all there was to “escape to” was a region where his view of the city would be full of distortions and omissions, and would eventually fade to black. "
110 " Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. "
111 " He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software’s approximations and short-cuts. This body didn’t want to evaporate. This body didn’t want to bail out. It didn’t much care that there was another – “more real” – version of itself, elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure. "
112 " She looked at him oddly. “Don’t you want to satisfy your curiosity? Now – and forever, for the one who’ll stay behind?” He thought about it, then shook his head. “One clone will see the finished city. One won’t. Both will share a past when they’d never even heard of the place. The clone outside, who never sees the city, will try to guess what it’s like. The clone inside will run other environments, and sometimes he won’t think about the city at all. When he does, sometimes he’ll misremember it. And sometimes he’ll dream about wildly distorted versions of what he’s seen. “I define all those moments as part of me. So … what is there to be curious about? "
113 " If you’d managed to force it open, you would have made a direct path between the interior of the Peerless and the void, which is something we try to discourage. "
― Greg Egan , The Eternal Flame (Orthogonal, #2)
114 " Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy – to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us. "
― Greg Egan , Distress (Subjective Cosmology #3)
115 " Maybe it seems strange to you, all the trouble we’re taking to catch a glimpse of what you’re going to see in close-up, so soon. It’s hard to explain: I don’t think it’s jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence. "
116 " Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don’t have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist – or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses – and frankly, I don’t care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the colour of their skin was. "
117 " Twelve thousand years after walking the plank, Rakesh woke on the floor of his tent. He was lying face-down on a blue and gold sleeping mat; he drew in a deep breath to savour the rich scent of its fibres. This was the tent he’d carried with him on all his travels on Shab-e-Noor, and it remained with him wherever he went. "
118 " Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. Kate "
119 " While Azelio and Tarquinia debated the merits of different landing sites, Ramiro clung to a rope beside the window and gazed down at the starlit world below. How could he understand Esilio? Of all the sciences he’d studied as a child, geology had been the least developed – and at the time, he’d imagined, the least likely ever to be of use to him. Of the little that he remembered, he remained unsure what he should trust. The ancestors had had no idea what a rock was actually made of, while their successors, with all their superior knowledge, had never set eyes on a planet. "
120 " Had David Hawthorne, by another name, achieved the immortality he’d paid for? Or had he died somewhere along the way? There was no answer. The most that could be said, at any moment, was that someone existed who knew – or believed – that they’d once been David Hawthorne. And so Peer had made the conscious decision to let that be enough. "