Quotes from Schild's Ladder

Greg Egan ·  352 pages

Rating: (2.5K votes)


“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


About the author

Greg Egan
Born place: in Perth, Australia
Born date August 20, 1961
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“impossible for me to be in correspondence with a Jew even if it were not that I have an official position to maintain. If a communication becomes necessary you must enclose it with the bank draft and not write to me at my house again. As for the stern measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew -- yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it. The”
― Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, quote from Address Unknown


“But if time exists only in my head, and I'm the last human being, it will end with my death. The thought cheers me. I may be in a position to murder time. The big net will tear and fall, with its sad contents, into oblivion. I'm owed some gratitude, but no one after my death will know I murdered time. Really these thoughts are quite meaningless. Things happen, and, like millions of people before me, I look for meaning in them, because my vanity will not allow me to admit that the whole meaning of an event lies in the event itself.”
― Marlen Haushofer, quote from The Wall


“Anger is simply momentary madness, and sometimes there is strength in silence. After all, he is only throwing words, not stones.”
― Jeff Shaara, quote from Rise to Rebellion


“He's a beast. A monster.
And he looks like he wants to devour me.”
― J.M. Darhower, quote from Monster in His Eyes


“Everything about her spoke of alternatives and possibilities that if considered too deeply would wreak havoc with the neat plan I had laid out for my life.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, quote from Nervous Conditions


Interesting books

Leviathan Wakes
(98.5K)
The Broken Wings
(13.5K)
The Broken Wings
by Kahlil Gibran
What Alice Forgot
(237.9K)
What Alice Forgot
by Liane Moriarty
Roses
(12.8K)
Roses
by Leila Meacham
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
(7.7K)
In the Shadow of You...
by Marcel Proust
I Shall Wear Midnight
(37.9K)
I Shall Wear Midnigh...
by Terry Pratchett

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.