The Quantum Magician Quotes

“I’ve found out how to move past my instincts, as all rational beings must.” “Hollow words, Arjona. We certainly all have to fulfill our programming, no matter who the programmer.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“A con man called Gander had once taught him that there were only three bets. Sometimes, you play the cards. Sometimes, you play the player. Sometimes, you just throw the dice.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“I’m surprised Bel hasn’t seen it. The whole of the Way of the Mongrel is a kind of con. The tough don’t-fuck-with-me shell is what the world sees, and then you let the world imagine that it’s overcompensation for deep insecurities. But!” she said. “The but is very important.” “My butt is important,” Stills said.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“I can half believe you. I can half doubt you. Doubt and belief are just another way of stating probability.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“The Anglo-Spanish penal system either struck visitors as refreshingly civilized or as stingingly rapacious. Sentences could be commuted or pardoned for large cash payments, or for the transfer of assets such as stock or annuities. Absent this, prison corporations happily extended moderate-interest sentence-mortgages to a sponsor, or even to parolees themselves. Visitors could buy different levels of access to the prison via a transparent list of escalating fees, which in the Congregate would have been called bribes. Some nations just did prisons better than others.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“I said it because it was meaningful to you, like my nonexistent soul,” Belisarius said. “Just because neither exists to me doesn’t mean they don’t exist for you. I’m Homo quantus; I live in an observer-dependent world where very important things can exist and not exist at the same time.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“To do this, he had to enter the fugue, to cease being himself entirely. He was already halfway to being someone else. Savant shut down all sorts of cognitive functions, changing who he was by temporarily damaging his brain. But entering the quantum fugue meant not being anyone. He’d avoided the fugue for years, run from it and from home. His hands trembled. He put them under his arms. They watched him. Watching him. Stop watching me.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“After a few moments, his capacity to conceptualize linguistic and social nuance dwindled, as did smell, taste and touch. At the same time, activity in the right anterior lobe increased, augmenting mathematically creative connections and increasing geometric thinking beyond prodigy levels. The Homo quantus called this state of being ‘savant.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“As intelligence was an emergent property of life, so games of controlled chance were an emergent property of intelligence. Intellect was an adaptive evolutionary structure, allowing humanity not only to sense the world in space, but to predict future events through time. Games of chance tested that predictive machine—so much so that games of controlled chance discriminated consciousness from unconsciousness far better than Turing.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“He liked when she explained what she felt. It helped him understand. Her hand movements meant exasperation. “Where exactly do you want us to make a wormhole to?” she asked.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“Belisarius didn’t meet their eyes. In savant, meeting people’s eyes was like looking into a box of puzzle pieces, making the pattern recognition tendencies in his brain hyperactive, facial expressions swirling into cycles of false positives.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“With baseline human sight, he could see four thousand stars. Between those, emptiness yawned wide and endless. If he telescoped his ocular implants, he might see five times that number, but the space between them would also multiply, bringing new, trackless voids into being. The view tasted like the fugue: seeing all the cosmos and not only knowing it to be a void, but being part of that void.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“Theology is the queen of the sciences.”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“Life is short and life isn’t fair. You’ve got to grab it and own it before it owns you. And I might as well kick somebody in the huevos if I have to, right?”
― Derek Künsken, The Quantum Magician

“Боевые корабли? – переспросил дель Касаль. – Боевые корабли с такими двигателями нарушат баланс сил, и не один.
– Проклятие, – удовлетворенно сказал Уильям.”
― Дерек Кюнскен, The Quantum Magician

“Он стал грандиозен, он перерос самого себя.”
― Дерек Кюнскен, The Quantum Magician

“Мари дала тягу куда больше, чем требовалось. Святой Матфей разразился ругательствами, вперемежку с векторами направления полета.”
― Дерек Кюнскен, The Quantum Magician