Distress Quotes

“I said, ‘The truth is whatever you can get away with.’ ‘No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Because sex, drugs, and religion all hinge on the same kind of simple neurochemical events: addictive, euphoric, exhilirating - and all, equally, meaningless.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“I was matter, like everything else. I could feel the slow decay of my body, the absolute certainty of death. Every heartbeat spelt out a new proof of mortality. Every moment was a premature burial.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“If there was one remaining purpose to my life, though, this was it: to prove that the truth could always be faced – explained, demystified, accepted.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Have you heard the story of the widow’s mite?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘For years, as a schoolboy, I turned it over and over in my head. The poor widow’s small gift was more precious than the rich man’s large one. Okay. Fine. I understood the message. I could see the dignity it gave to every act of charity. But I could see a whole lot more encoded in that parable, and those other things wouldn’t go away. ‘I could see a religion which cared more about feeling good than doing good. A religion which valued the pleasure of giving – or the pain – more than any tangible effect. A religion which put … saving your own soul through good works far above their worldly consequences.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“I used to think that if you changed from … valuing one thing to valuing another, it was because you’d learnt something new, understood something better. And it’s not like that at all. I just value what I’m stuck with. That’s it, that’s the whole story. People make a virtue out of necessity. They sanctify what they can’t escape.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Pick a number between ten and a thousand. Don’t tell me what it is. [Thinks … 575] Add the digits together. [17] Add them again. [8] Add 3. [11] Subtract this from the original number. [564] Add the digits together. [15] Find the remainder left when you divide by nine. [6] Square it. [36] Add 6. [42] The number in your head now is … 42? [Yes!] Now try it once again…”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Once people ceased to understand how the machines around them actually functioned, the world they inhabited began to dissolve into an incomprehensible dreamscape. Technology moved beyond control, beyond discussion, evoking only worship or loathing, dependence or alienation.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“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, Distress

“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, Distress

“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, Distress

“I was a dying machine of cells and molecules; I would never be able to doubt that again.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“I'm lost. I don't know what we're doing. I don't know where we're heading."
"Nowhere. We can stop if you want to. We can always just talk. Or we can talk without stopping. It's called freedom—you'll get used to it, eventually.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“I had no right to grieve for a loss which existed only in my head. Nobody had mutilated ver by force; ve had made vis own decision with vis eyes wide open. I had no right to wish ver healed.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Kuwale snorted, highly amused. “Self-esteem is a commodity invented by twentieth-century personal growth cults. If you want self-esteem – or an emotional center – go to Los Angeles and buy it.” Ve added, more sympathetically, “What is it with you Westerners? Sometimes it sounds to me like all the pre-scientific psychology of Freud and Jung – and all its market-driven US regurgitations – has hijacked your language and culture so completely that you can’t even think about yourselves anymore, except in cult-speak. And it’s so ingrained now, you don’t even know when you’re doing it.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“I’d always been swayed by the argument that no-one would waste money on R&D if engineered lifeforms couldn’t be patented – but there was something insane about the fact that the most powerful tools against famine, the most powerful tools against environmental damage, the most powerful tools against poverty … were all priced beyond the reach of everyone who needed them the most.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Once people ceased to understand how the machines around them actually functioned, the world they inhabited began to dissolve into an incomprehensible dreamscape. Technology moved beyond control, beyond discussion, evoking only worship or loathing, dependence or alienation. Arthur C. Clarke had suggested that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic – referring to a possible encounter with an alien civilization – but if a science journalist had one responsibility above all else, it was to keep Clarke’s Law from applying to human technology in human eyes.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“The truth is whatever you can’t escape.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Seven genders – and all of them perceived as monolithic. Everyone stereotyped at a glance. Seven pigeon-holes instead of two isn’t progress.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Okay. Exorcism time. Repeat after me: Uncle Sigmund, I renounce you as a charlatan, a bully, and a fabricator of data. A cor-rupter of language, a destroyer of lives”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Freud had saddled Western culture with the bizarre notion that the least considered utterances were always, magically, the truest-that reflection added nothing, and the ego merely censored or lied. It was an idea born more of convenience than anything else: he'd identified the part of the mind easiest to circumvent-with tricks like free association-and then declared the product of all that remained to be "honest.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Freud had saddled Western culture with the bizarre notion that the least
considered utterances were always, magically, the truest-that reflection added nothing,
and the ego merely censored or lied. It was an idea born more of convenience than
anything else: he'd identified the part of the mind easiest to circumvent-with tricks like
free association-and then declared the product of all that remained to be "honest.”
― Greg Egan, Distress

“Every democracy was a kind of anarchy in slow motion: any statute, any constitution could be changed, given time; any social contract, written or unwritten, could be dishonoured.”
― Greg Egan, Distress