
Exhalation: Stories

Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
Brahman Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they are strengthening the building blocks of reality.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.
Ted Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the a
... See moreTed Chiang • Exhalation: Stories
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.