Quotes from Schild's Ladder

“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

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“الذّكاء هو إخفاق في الارتقاء. في عصر الإنسان البدائي ما قبل التّاريخي، أتخيّل جيّدًا، وسط قبيلة صغيرة، كلّ الأطفال و هم يركضون وسط الأدغال، و يطاردون العظّايات، و يقطفون العنبيّات للعشاء، و يتعلّمون تدريجيًّا، من خلال احتكاكهم بالبالغين، أن يكونوا رجالًا و نساء كاملين: صيّادون، قطّافون، صيّادو سمك، دبّاغون... و لكن إذا أمعنّا النّظر في حياة هذه القبيلة سنكتشف أنّ بعض الأطفال لا يشاركون في أنشطة الجماعة: يظلّون جالسين قرب النّار، آمنين داخل الكهف.
سوف لن يحسنوا قط الدّفاع عن أنفسهم ذد نمور بأنياب قاطعة، ولا أن يصطادوا، سوف لن يبقوا، باستسلامهم، أحياء لليلة واحدة. و إذا كانوا يمضون أيّامهم دون أن يفعلوا شيئًا، فذلك ليس بسبب الكسل و الخمول، بل يرغبون في أن يقفزوا و يلهوا مع زملائهم و لكنّهم لا يستطيعون. فالطّبيعة، حينما أنجبتهم إلى الدّني، أصابتهم بالعجز. في هذه القبيلة الصّغيرة، ثمّة طفلة ضريرة و صبيّ أعرج، و آخر أخرق و شارد الذّهن...

و بالتّالي، يلزمون طيلة النّهار مسكنهم، و لأنّ ليس لديهم ما يفعلوه سوى ألعاب الفيديو التي لم تخترع بعد، يضطرّون للتّفكير و ترك أفكارهم شاردة. فيمضون وقتهم في التّفكير، في محاولة فك طلاسم العالم، في تخيّل حكايات و ابتكارات. و هكذا تولد الحضارة: لأنّ أولادًا عاجزين ليس لديهم ما يفعلونه غير ذلك.”
― Martin Page, quote from How I Became Stupid

“Crazy must run in your family,” he says.
“You do know Fia!” I blurt, then bite my lip.”
― Kiersten White, quote from Perfect Lies

“The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike…is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons I might fall off ” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.”
― Varun Agarwal, quote from How I Braved Anu Aunty & Co-Founded A Million Dollar Company

“People who asked questions didn't necessary like being asked questions.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Acceptance

“The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from Authority

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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.