“My earliest memories are of CP4 — that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex directions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" — he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space — for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single three-dimensional space.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder
“You’ll never stop changing, but that doesn’t
mean you have to drift in the wind. Every day, you can take
the person you’ve been, and the new things you’ve witnessed,
and make your own, honest choice as to who you should become.
“Whatever happens, you can always be true to yourself. But
don’t expect to end up with the same inner compass as anyone
else. Not unless they started beside you, and climbed beside
you every step of the way.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder
“It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder
“There's nothing worse than a label to cement people's loyalties.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder
“You don't take a traveler for a partner if you hope that the world will always stay the same. You do it because you can't quite break away, yourself, but you can't live without the promise of change hanging over you every day.
That's what the border means, for a lot of people. The promise of change they'd never be able to make any other way.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Schild's Ladder
“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, quote from Schild's Ladder
Greg Egan
Born place: in Perth, Australia
Born date August 20, 1961
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“Can I ask a stupid question?"
"Sure. Ask away."
"It's sort of more than one question. But... Look, um... Why do we hurt? Why do we die? Why isn't life good all the time? Why isn't it fair?"
"Those aren't stupid questions, Hazel. For some people they're the only questions that matter."
"Does that mean you won't answer them?"
"Sure, I'll answer. But it's kind of a big subject, and it's got lots of answers, and the answers don't really mean anything-- They aren't stupid questions but they could just as well be 'When is purple?' or 'Why does Thursday?', if you see what I mean..."
"Not really."
"Well, I think some of it is probably contrasts. Light and Shadow. If you never had the bad times, how would you know you had the good times? But some of it is just: If you're going to be Human, then there are a whole load of things that come with it. Eyes, a Heart, Days and Life.
It's the moments that illuminate it, though. The times you don't see when you're having them... They make the rest of it matter.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Death: The Time of Your Life
“Desire is when you do what you want, will is when you can do what you do not want.”
― P.D. Ouspensky, quote from The Fourth Way
“Some months earlier one of his oldest friends, Junto charter member Hugh Roberts, had written with news of the club and how the political quarreling in Philadelphia had continued to divide the membership. Franklin expressed hope that the squabbles would not keep Roberts from the meetings. “’tis now perhaps one of the oldest clubs, as I think it was formerly one of the best, in the King’s dominions; it wants but about two years of forty since it was established.” Few men were so lucky as to belong to such a group. “We loved and still love one another; we are grown grey together and yet it is too early to part. Let us sit till the evening of life is spent; the last hours were always the most joyous. When we can stay no longer ’tis time enough then to bid each other good night, separate, and go quietly to bed.” And”
― H.W. Brands, quote from The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
“That’s right: Never underestimate the power of a good laugh. It can stop some of the fiercest middle-school monsters.”
― James Patterson, quote from Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
“إن الأزمة العميقة للهوية البشرية التي سببتها الحياة "في الكذب", والحياة التي أسست عليها لها بالتأكيد بعد أخلاقي: يظهر هذا البعد كأزمة أخلاقية عميقة في المجتمع, إن الإنسان الذي سقط في منظومة القيم الإستهلاكية, وانصهر في مزيج القافلة الحضارية, ولم ينخرط في نظام الوجود بناء على شعوره بمسؤولية أعلى من مسؤوليته عن البقاء كفرد يعد إنسان منزوع الأخلاق. يعتمد النظام على هذا الإنعدام الأخلاقي ويعمقه كمخرج اجتماعي له.”
― Václav Havel, quote from The Power of the Powerless
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The Old Man and the...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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