To Hold Up the Sky Quotes

“when you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“She felt she as if she could gaze at it forever and it wouldn’t be enough. Beneath the ring of ice, she was sometimes dazed, sometimes steeped in an indescribable happiness. This was the happiness of when an artist found ultimate beauty. She was completely conquered by this immense beauty. Her entire soul was dissolved in it...


Steeped in sorrow, she buried her head in her hands. This was the deep sorrow that arose when an artist saw beauty she could never produce, when she realized she would never be able to transcend her limitations.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“War is as regular and ordered as economics?” “War is economics.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer.”
― Liu Cixin, Hold Up the Sky

“If we’re going to be blind, let’s both be blind. If we’re going to be deaf, let’s both be deaf.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“There’s no reason to believe that the pace of life for all beings in the universe is like that of humanity.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Imagine if DNA never made mistakes, always replicating and inheriting with perfect fidelity. What would life on Earth become?”


“In that case, life would no longer exist on Earth. The basis of the evolution of life is mutation, caused by mistakes in DNA.”


“Society is the same way. Its evolution and vitality is rooted in the myriad urges and desires departing from the morality laid out by the majority. A fish can’t live in perfectly clear water. A society where no one ever makes mistakes in ethics is, in reality, dead.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Of all the noble, vaunted heroes we hear about, at least half were contemptible liars and schemers who used their influence to claim achievements and write the histories, and managed to succeed. Of those who really did give everything for truth and justice, two-thirds choked to death horribly and quietly in the dust of history, forgotten by everyone, and the remaining one-third had their reputations smeared into eternal infamy, just like Song Cheng. Only a tiny percentage were remembered as they were by history, less than the exposed corner of the iceberg.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Humanity is a dewdrop on the great tree of the universe. During its brief life span, it absolutely cannot perceive the maturing of the great tree.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“The strongest feeling I’ve gotten from my time in this age is that we’re beyond the time when knowledge can explain everything.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Language was a bottleneck—he knew he didn’t have enough time. He fantasized that the knowledge he had spent his life accumulating—not much, but dear to him—was lodged in his brain like small pearls, and that as he spoke, a crystal ax chopped the pearls out of his brain onto the floor, where the children scrambled to gather them like sweets at New Year’s. It was a happy fantasy.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Information technology advances in great strides. Except for those lucky enough to climb into management, everyone’s knowledge and skills grow obsolete quickly.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“When it was born, the universe was smaller than an atom, and everything within it was intermixed as a single whole; the natural connection between the universe’s small parts and its great entirety was thus determined. Though the universe has expanded to whatever its current size, this connection still exists, and if we can’t see it now, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“When a civilization travels far enough on the road of time, individual and collective both disappear... form and content both disappear.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Your world is brimming with wonder and mystery. Your thoughts stretch across hundreds of light-years of space and billions of years of time. To you, the Earth is just a speck of dust in the universe. To you, this era is just an instant in time too short to measure. The entire universe seems to exist to satisfy your curiosity and fulfill your existence... I truly envy you. I dreamed of this when I was young, but to enter your world was too difficult.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“In this total information age, what is wealth? Ultimately, it’s no more than strands of pulses and magnetic marks inside computer storage... What is money? Money isn’t worth shit. Money is just a strand of electromagnetic marks even smaller than bacteria and pulses that disappear in a flash.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“If a country can condemn its president on Main Street, that’s called democracy. However, if everyone disobeys their boss, then this country will collapse.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“In the invisible world, imagination and reality are the same thing. When something appears in your imagination, it becomes reality. Of course, as you said, reality in quantum memory is a collection of impulses. The people of this age are gradually transitioning to the invisible world, and more of them now live there than in the visible world. Even though a copy of the brain can be in both worlds, the invisible world is like a drug. No one wants to come back once they’ve experienced life there.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Imagine a windowless, iron room. Many people lie asleep inside. They will soon suffocate and die in their sleep. You shout, and a few hopeless sleepers awaken to a wretched fate that you are powerless to prevent. Have you done them a favor? Unless you wake them up, what hope do they have of escape?”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“If you shrank the solar system to the size of a dinner plate, the diameter of a correspondingly shrunken Milky Way would still be one hundred thousand kilometers.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“To abandon balance and seek an extreme is a sign of immaturity in politics.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“The stories in this anthology touch on a variety of sci-fi themes, but they all have something in common: They are about things that concern all of humanity, and the challenges and crises they depict are all things humanity faces together. In fact, when you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Some people had already proposed pulling the whole of Europa out of Jupiter’s deep gravity well, pushing it to Earth, and making it Earth’s second moon. This way, Earth would receive much more water than 18 percent. It could turn Earth’s ecosystem into a glorious paradise.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Nevertheless, at least existence was possible. Most people felt content with that.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Energy dissipates. Only the cold is eternal. The beauty of the cold is the only enduring beauty.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“The only difference between those reporters and prostitutes is that they sell a different body part.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“I had discovered that practically all the history we know is a lie. Of all the noble, vaunted heroes we hear about, at least half were contemptible liars and schemers who used their influence to claim achievements and write the histories, and managed to succeed. Of those who really did give everything for truth and justice, two-thirds choked to death horribly and quietly in the dust of history, forgotten by everyone, and the remaining one-third had their reputations smeared into eternal infamy, just like Song Cheng.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“There is no absolute space-time. Time, space, and the material world are all inextricably linked together.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Although the universe is vast, we are inside it. Every change in the microscopic and macroscopic world affects everything.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky

“Humanity is a dewdrop on the great tree of the universe.”
― Liu Cixin, To Hold Up the Sky