Exhalation Quotes

“Each time you do something generous, you’re shaping yourself into someone who’s more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.”
― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

“If humanity is the central fact of the universe, if our species is the omphalos, then a close examination of the celestial sphere should confirm that privileged status. Our solar system should be the fixed point against which all else is moving; our Sun should be at absolute rest. If the evidence doesn’t support that premise, then we must ask where our commitment truly lies.”
― Ted Chiang, Omphalos

“But what if that’s not true? What if”—his voice cracked—“what if God had no intentions about us at all?”
― Ted Chiang, Omphalos

“You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“for like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

“A company called Edgeplayer markets a digient torture chamber on the Real Space platform; to avoid accusations of unauthorized copying, they use only public-domain digients as victims. The user group has agreed that once they get the Neuroblast engine ported, their conversion procedure will include full ownership verification; no Neuroblast digient will ever enter Real Space without someone committed to taking care of it.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“Raising a child, she said, “puts you in touch, deeply, inescapably, daily, with some pretty heady issues: What is love and how do we get ours? Why does the world contain evil and pain and loss? How can we discover dignity and tolerance? Who is in power and why? What’s the best way to resolve conflict?”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“As a journalist, I have long appreciated the usefulness of lifelogging for determining the facts of the matter. There is scarcely a legal proceeding, criminal or civil, that doesn’t make use of someone’s lifelog, and rightly so. When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that’s needed for forgiveness to begin. I thought back to what Erica Meyers said about Remem’s inability to hurt solid marriages. Implicit in that assertion was a claim about what qualified as a solid marriage. If someone’s marriage was built on—as ironic as it might sound—a cornerstone of forgetfulness, what right did Whetstone have to shatter that?”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“I asked them to imagine what it would be like if we lived in a world where, no matter how deeply we dug, we kept finding traces of an earlier era of the world. I asked them to imagine being confronted with proof of a past extending so far back that the numbers lost all meaning: a hundred thousand years, a million years, ten million years. Then I asked, wouldn’t they feel lost, like a castaway adrift on an ocean of time? The only sane response would be despair. I told them that we are not so adrift. We have dropped an anchor and struck bottom; we can be certain that the shoreline is close by, even if we can’t see it. We know that you made this universe with a purpose in mind; we know that a harbor awaits. I told them that our means of navigation is scientific inquiry. And, I said, this is why I am a scientist: because I wish to discover your purpose for us, Lord.”
― Ted Chiang, Omphalos

“They applauded when I had finished speaking, and I admit that I took pleasure from that. Forgive me for my pride, Lord. Help me to remember that all the work I do—whether it is excavating bones in the desert or giving lectures to the public—is not for my own glory, but for yours. Let me never forget that my task is to show others the beauty of your works and in doing so bring them closer to you. Amen.”
― Ted Chiang, Omphalos

“writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“the fundamental incompatibility between Exponential’s goals and hers. They want something that responds like a person, but isn’t owed the same obligations as a person, and that’s something she can’t give them. No one can give it to them, because it’s an impossibility. The years she spent raising Jax didn’t just make him fun to talk to, didn’t just provide him with hobbies and a sense of humor. They were what gave him all the attributes Exponential is looking for: fluency at navigating the real world, creativity at solving new problems, judgment you could entrust with an important decision. Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience. She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was more right than it knew: experience isn’t merely the best teacher; it’s the only teacher.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“The idea of love with no strings attached is as much a fantasy as what Binary Desire is selling. Loving someone means making sacrifices for them.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“We've all made mistakes," she said. "Believe me, I've made my share. But there's a difference between accepting responsibility for our actions and taking the blame for random misfortunes.”
― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

“If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

“When a prism was activated, a quantum measurement was performed inside the device, with two possible outcomes of equal probability:”
― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

“Sabe, who had been listening to them, chided Kokwa. “It’s not your place to judge Jijingi. The hare favors one food, the hippo favors another. Let each spend his time as he pleases.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“InstantRapport is one of the smart transdermals, a patch that delivers doses of an oxytocin-opioid cocktail whenever the wearer is in the presence of a specific person. It’s used to strengthen rocky marriages and strained parent-child relationships, and it’s recently become available without a prescription.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words. Once he found the one he wanted, he could hold on to it for as long as he needed.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“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. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“the Europeans often believe paper over people.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“I would have testified, hand on a stack of Bibles or using any oath required of me, that it was Nicole who’d accused me of being the reason her mother left us. My recollection of that argument was as clear as any memory I had, but that wasn’t the only reason I found the video hard to believe; it was also my knowledge that—whatever my faults or imperfections—I was never the kind of father who could say such a thing to his child. Yet here was digital video proving that I had been exactly that kind of father. And while I wasn’t that man anymore, I couldn’t deny that I was continuous with him. Even more telling was the fact that for many years I had successfully hidden the truth from myself. Earlier I said that the details we choose to remember are a reflection of our personalities. What did it say about me that I put those words in Nicole’s mouth instead of mine?”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“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. But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t.”
― Ted Chiang, What's Expected of Us

“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, What's Expected of Us

“And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong. Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory?”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling