Singer Distance Quotes

“a constellation is formed by points of light that are not connected to each other by anything other than the observer”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“She told us the two sides of an equation are in love with each other. To stay in love, they have to maintain their balance. What one loses, the other must lose. What one accepts, the other must accept. I felt like she defined love and algebra for me at the same time.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“Dear Rick,

I've never thought math was a miracle. The things we study simply are. They were the rules of the universe before we were here to understand them. They operate the world behind the curtain, whether we look behind it or not. The rules are already there. Music is a miracle. It adds something to the world that didn't have to be here. Language is a miracle. Every sentence ever spoken and every song ever sung is a new invention. Not only do they add something new to the world, they transmit thoughts and emotions that would otherwise be locked within one person. I hear a song and feel something a composer felt 200 years ago. I read your letter and hear your voice saying the words. I feel you in the room with me. That's the miracle.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“A road can be the connection between places or the distance between them”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“Crystal owed the two of us so many apologies, but I’d spent enough years imagining extracting those from my father to know that wringing someone else out didn’t make you any fuller.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“Fathers got too attached to being the guiding star. They had trouble when the time came to walk side by side.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“A road erases the land it runs through. The land becomes a vessel to bear the road, and we no longer see the land. We see the strand of black thread for which the land is just a background. Our eyes follow it to the horizon and our cars follow it farther. If you blow a tire you're stuck in the middle of nowhere. As if the land itself does not exist. This place is sacred because it draws the eye back to the land. First the Richter Site and then the Singer Site drew the eyes of the world back to this land we've tried so hard to reduce to the time it takes to traverse, which we quantify as lost time. These sites made the land exist again. Even across an interstellar distance, they made this land seen.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“In truth, I'd been thinking a lot about entropy in recent years. I'd felt myself slowing down, my energy stagnating. Otis's body was falling apart. Ronnie and Priya—they weren't disintegrating in the same way, but their hope, their energy were sapped. When Angie left, I lost all sense of progress, or even stasis. My sense of self, of organization, of capability, was a pile of Lincoln Logs scattered across the floor. All this wanted to pour out when Rhea asked me about entropy. I held back what I could. You don't want to withhold the truth from a kid. You also can't tell them: Entropy will be the story of your life.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“He was terrified of entropy, of the assured eventual heat death of the universe. I took comfort in the assured plain old death of our bodies long before then, but anyone who'd spent time thinking about astronomy had their thing. For me it was black holes. Just two years earlier, David Finkelstein had clarified the nature of a black hole's event horizon, cementing his place in the history of astrophysics and also in my nightmares. For Ronnie it was the scope of the universe, and the impossibility of traversing even a tiny fraction of it. For Priya it was a fear that there was no grand theory of everything, that the universe behaved strangely simply because it wanted to.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“When his students didn't get a concept, he didn't want to see them go silent and give up. He wanted to see them try again and again. He wanted them not to accept not understanding. The only way forward was to keep giving your next best wrong answer.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“The great supposed breakthrough of Haufmann and Eisen was an argument that this meant distance did not exist at all. Distance was a construct, an illusion. That was thinking around the problem, Crystal said. That was important men deciding that if they couldn't explain something, it must be unexplainable.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“Everything goes to tragedy. That's the direction of the universe.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“I didn’t know whether these pictures would end up in history books or be used against me in a court hearing, but they would testify to something.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“An infinitesimal fraction of the sun’s energy is responsible for all the abundance of our planet. A good thing we can’t see the torrent of waste, the enormity of what’s lost. Imagine pouring a jug of milk down the drain. The droplets of leftover milk in the sink? That’s what we live off.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“Light takes eight minutes to travel from the sun to Earth, so if you look at it one way there’s a grace period between when the star stops burning and when the light runs out. But if you look at the first moment without light as the first possible information heralding the end of the star, there’s no time in between the star’s collapse and the light running out. The eight minutes carry the moment of collapse on their backs.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“A partnership is about who takes out the garbage. The two might take turns dumping out the can. One might dump it out every time. It doesn’t work if you both wait for the other to do it. If you can manage that problem, you can figure out the rest.”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“Light-years of distance separate us even from ourselves”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance