Stories of Your Life and Others

by Ted Chiang

I remember a conversation we’ll have

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations.

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.

The word “infant” is derived from the Latin word for “unable to speak,” but you’ll be perfectly capable of saying one thing: “I suffer,”

According to speech act theory, statements like “You’re under arrest,” “I christen this vessel,” or “I promise” were all performative: a speaker could perform the action only by uttering the words.

“Well if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?” “Cause I wanna hear it!”

Now that Sarah was in Heaven, his situation had changed. Neil wanted more than anything to be reunited with her, and the only way to get to Heaven was to love God with all his heart.

So you see, this debate isn’t just about commercials and cosmetics, it’s about determining what’s the appropriate relationship between the mind and the body. Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our natures?

a lot of words we use to describe an attractive person used to be words for magic. Like the word “charm” originally meant a magic spell, and the word “glamour” did, too. And it’s just blatant with words like “enchanting” and “spellbinding.” And when he said that, I thought, yeah, that’s what it’s like: seeing a really good-looking person is like having a magic spell cast over you.

If you’re outraged by that sort of lookism, how can you afford to get calli? You’re precisely the type of person who’s needed to blow the whistle on that behavior, but if you’ve got calli, you won’t be able to recognize it.

One of the things we admire most in fiction is an ending that is surprising, yet inevitable. This is also what characterizes elegance in design: the invention that’s clever yet seems totally natural.