Top 90 Greg Egan Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn’t only new ones who suffer from that.”

— Greg Egan

52. “All we can ever know about are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.”

— Greg Egan

53. “The Aleph moment would be followed, on a timescale of seconds, by the degeneration of physics into pure mathematics. Just as the Big Bang implied pre-space before it – an infinitely symmetric roiling abstraction where nothing really existed or happened – the Aleph moment would bring on the informational mirror image, another infinite wasteland without time or space.”

— Greg Egan

54. “That’s all I am, now. That’s all that defines me. So when they’re happy, they’ll be me.”

— Greg Egan

55. “I don’t have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don’t.”

— Greg Egan

56. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.”

— Greg Egan

57. “How do you know which parts of the world are you, in the polises?’ ‘Are there citizens in Konishi who eat music?’ ‘Is not having a body like falling all the time, without moving?”

— Greg Egan

58. “I hadn’t given much thought to the prospect of a Hugo nomination at the time it happened, but obviously once you’re nominated, winning one seems a bit less far-fetched than before.”

— Greg Egan

59. “A story in Asimov’s is read by hundreds of thousands of people.”

— Greg Egan

60. “We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more.”

— Greg Egan

61. “Paul counted – and for argument’s sake, tried to defend his own perspective, tried to imagine the outside world actually cycling through fragments of time drawn from ten distinct periods.”

— Greg Egan

62. “Science has been abused for every conceivable purpose under the sun. Which is all the more reason to deliver the power it grants to as many people as possible, as rapidly as possible, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few. It is not a reason to retreat into fantasy – to declare: knowledge is a cultural artifact, nothing is universally true, only mysticism and obfuscation and ignorance will save us.”

— Greg Egan

63. “Immortality would have been meaningless, trapped in a “machine” with a finite number of possible states; in a finite time he would have exhausted the list of every possible thing he could be. Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life.”

— Greg Egan

64. “This was her last chance at the closest thing to freedom: her will, her actions, and the outcome in the world could all be in harmony.”

— Greg Egan

65. “Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don’t have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist – or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses – and frankly, I don’t care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the colour of their skin was.”

— Greg Egan

66. “A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them.”

— Greg Egan

67. “There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.”

— Greg Egan

68. “Detective Segel, the evidence shows that you experienced a penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate response?”

— Greg Egan

69. “Who exactly am I saving from shame, when I’ll live and die in every possible way?”

— Greg Egan

70. “You know, in formal logic, an inconsistent set of axioms can be used to prove anything at all. Once you have a single contradiction, A and not A, there’s nothing you can’t derive from it.”

— Greg Egan

71. “What am I? The data? The process that generates it? The relationships between the numbers?”

— Greg Egan

72. “Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I’ve been led astray like that myself at times.”

— Greg Egan

73. “No one objects to the notion that every technological civilisation might undergo its own Introdus.”

— Greg Egan

74. “As he walked past shops and teahouses he could still.”

— Greg Egan

75. “He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software’s approximations and short-cuts. This body didn’t want to evaporate. This body didn’t want to bail out. It didn’t much care that there was another – “more real” – version of itself, elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.”

— Greg Egan

76. “If you’d managed to force it open, you would have made a direct path between the interior of the Peerless and the void, which is something we try to discourage.”

— Greg Egan

77. “Peer shook his head. “What have I become, already? An endless series of people – all happy for their own private reasons. Linked together by the faintest thread of memory. Why keep them spread out in time? Why go on pretending that there’s one ‘real’ person, enduring through all those arbitrary changes?”

— Greg Egan

78. “The future has always been determined. What else could affect human actions, other than each individual’s – unique and complex – inheritance and past experience? Who we are decides what we do – and what greater ‘freedom’ could anyone demand? If ‘choice’ wasn’t grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome? Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain.”

— Greg Egan

79. “What would you have done in the old days?’ he asked. ‘If you’d been piloting a gnat with this kind of damage?’ ‘Flown it back to a workshop in the Peerless for repairs.’ ‘And if you couldn’t use the engines until the repairs were completed?’ Tarquinia said, ‘Then I’d call someone for a tow. See how a lifetime of experience has prepared me for this moment?”

— Greg Egan

80. “Maybe it seems strange to you, all the trouble we’re taking to catch a glimpse of what you’re going to see in close-up, so soon. It’s hard to explain: I don’t think it’s jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.”

— Greg Egan

81. “A citizen who spiralled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorise help, or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.”

— Greg Egan

82. “When first resurrected, he’d worried constantly over which aspects of his past he should imitate for the sake of sanity, and which he should discard as a matter of honesty.”

— Greg Egan

83. “Only the promise of eternal growth made sense of eternal life. Kate.”

— Greg Egan

84. “The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions. “We’d.”

— Greg Egan

85. “I’m rarely grabbed by anything the way I was when I was 10 years younger. About the only relatively new artists whose albums I own are Beck, and They Might Be Giants.”

— Greg Egan

86. “He tried to dredge up the familiar, comforting truths: The Copy would survive, it would live his life for him. This body was always destined to perish; he’d accepted that long ago. Death was the irreversible dissolution of the personality; this wasn’t death, it was a shedding of skin. There was nothing to fear.”

— Greg Egan

87. “I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.”

— Greg Egan

88. “In a human, or a Copy being run in the usual way, the physics of brain or computer meant that the state of mind at any one moment directly influenced the state of mind that followed.”

— Greg Egan

89. “If you’re not prepared to perform the experiment yourself, at least think about the implications. Imagine that you’ve modified the way in which you’re computed – and imagine what the consequences would be. A gedanken experiment – is that too much to ask for? In a sense, that’s all I ever performed myself.”

— Greg Egan

90. “Everyone had to carve a life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance.”

— Greg Egan

91. “If the technology improves sufficiently, the environmental impact of the wealthiest Copy could end up being less than that of the most ascetic living human. Who’ll have the high moral ground, then? We’ll be the most ecologically sound people on the planet.”

— Greg Egan

92. “There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect myself. I’d just have to do it consciously, every step of the way.”

— Greg Egan