Shroud Quotes

“But, like I said, entropy was the house that always won in the end. Everything we humans had ever built, from a stone axe to a spaceship, was just borrowing from a universe that would always claim it back with interest. Our whole civilization, art, mind and tech, was founded in the shadow of that truth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“Intelligent aliens might introduce a level of moral complexity that would compromise operational efficiency. Cynical of me to think about it in that way, I know, but there was always a good commercial use-case for minimizing the potential rights of whoever’s environment you were destroying.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“This too shall pass: simultaneously the best and worst commentary on any moment of human experience.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“The great illusion of mind is its singularity. The lie that it originates from some inalienable and solitary point. The self. The soul. On Earth, mind arises from the interactions of millions of neurons, deceiving the organism into believing that it thinks.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“I mean, you can’t expect to sit around and be paid just because they’ll need you at some point. It’s a good system. It is. It’s necessary.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“Let me tell you into words you can understand...”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“I begin to think you are just an artefact, a memory left over in your empty things.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“entropy was the house that always won in the end. Everything we humans had ever built, from a stone axe to a spaceship, was just borrowing from a universe that would always claim it back with interest. Our whole civilization, art, mind and tech, was founded in the shadow of that truth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“With the palette of thought available to me, I recontextualize this encounter.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“It is my eternal curse, that each thing I learn sloughs off me. It falls into the gap between me and each Otherlike, so for every step I take towards becoming something greater, I am dragged back. A miasma of ignorance surrounds me, like corrosive air that eats away at what I am whenever I venture too far from home.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“When the Stranger leads me into the reach of an Otherlike, what I have written in my emissary will explain everything. I hope. I only have a vague grasp of what that writing says, now. But I continue to rehearse my mission: Follow the Stranger. Preserve it. Learn from it. I do my best to hold onto the why of it all, but in the end those thoughts, so complex, are the first to fall away.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“Entropy was the house that always won in the end. Everything we humans had ever built, from a stone axe to a spaceship, was just borrowing from a universe that would always claim it back with interest. A whole civilization -- art, mind and tech -- was founded in the shadow of that truth.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“And yet the blindness of them, the weird asymmetry of their bodies, the bizarre intricacies of their construction, like mechanisms, like toys, all spoke of a queasy wrongness.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“the intervening steps between the maths and ‘profit”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“blind watchmakers”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud

“Kindly continue,’ they said, on the basis that if there was a stupid thing that needed to be said, it was always better for someone else to put it into words. And saying those stupid things”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud