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141 " I look up at her. “Let’s not make a big deal of this. It’s time for me to become a machine. "
― Greg Egan , Luminous
142 " 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 fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science. "
― Greg Egan , The Eternal Flame (Orthogonal, #2)
143 " Every democracy was a kind of anarchy in slow motion: any statute, any constitution could be changed, given time; any social contract, written or unwritten, could be dishonoured. "
― Greg Egan , Distress (Subjective Cosmology #3)
144 " You know my position. We need to come back in force and deal with this sickness once and for all: occupy the city, impose our own laws, harvest every noxious plant and burn it. It "
― Greg Egan , Dichronauts
145 " Go on. I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you say you’re no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee.” I protested, “That’s true. Why should I be ‘proud’ of something I was born with? I’m not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don’t have to join a parade to prove that. "
146 " You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist,” Stoney muttered.“Doubly?” “Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side. "
― Greg Egan ,
147 " The wormhole makes tangible the most basic truths of existence. You cannot see the future. You cannot change the past. All of life consists of running into darkness. This is why I’m here. "
― Greg Egan , Axiomatic
148 " That was the hazard she’d face every day, here: not just the risk that she’d give in to temptation, but the risk that all the principles she’d chosen to define herself would come to seem like nothing but masochistic nonsense. "
― Greg Egan , Schild's Ladder
149 " Recalculate. Then show me sunrise again. "
― Greg Egan , Permutation City (Subjective Cosmology #2)
150 " Kate had made both the environment and the body for him, and he liked the tranquil mood of the piece. There was no invented family, no role to play; this was a painting, not a drama. One place, one moment, lasting as long as he chose to inhabit it. "
151 " Every few decades, at random, I take on new goals, at random. It’s perfect. How could I improve on a scheme like that? I’m not stuck on any one thing forever; however much you think I’m wasting my time, it’s only for fifty or a hundred years. What difference does that make, in the long run? "
152 " -“I’ve never believed in wormholes,” Fatima confessed. “Take two in relative motion and you’ve got a time machine. And I definitely don’t believe in time machines.” -“Maybe you can believe in just one wormhole at a time,” Gabrielle replied, deadpan. "
― Greg Egan , Instantiation
153 " Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become. "
― Greg Egan , Diaspora
154 " I don’t believe their minds were so different from ours that we’re in danger of wildly misinterpreting anything that looks like a simple message. So far, the worst mistake we could have made would have been to give up too soon on trying to interpret the isotopes. "
155 " I mean, there’s got to be an art to expounding the virtues of logical positivism while garrotting Nazis with piano wire, and it looks as if Jarrod started missing their special flair. "
156 " walked a few paces away from her, then turned his whole body towards the south; in this flat desert, it wasn’t impractical to triple his axial span. He "
157 " Please don't tell me it was a double bluff ... Of all the even-numbered bluffs, the less-famous 'zero bluff' cancels itself out just as thoroughly, while attracting even less attention. "
158 " Don’t worry: there’s nothing you can do to rob me of my healthy respect for the possibility that your incompetence will kill me. "
― Greg Egan , The Arrows of Time (Orthogonal #3)
159 " Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this would could inflict. "
― Greg Egan
160 " Yatima’s mind was reeling. The Transmuters hadn’t indulged in any of the spectacular acts of astrophysical monument-building that a bored and powerful civilization might have gone in for: no planet-sculpting, no Dyson spheres, no black-hole juggling. But by tailoring a few neutrons on this obscure planet, they’d hitched the entire universe into synch with the time stream of an unimaginably larger structure. "
