Greg Egan: Quotes about time

Greg Egan is Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer. Explore interesting quotes on time.

Greg Egan: 46 quotes7 likes

“If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we're standing right now, we're going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over agaain.”

Source: Fiction, Zendegi (2010), Ch. 1

“My retainers keep me on ice. Dry ice. It slows my metabolism, takes the edge off my appetite, slightly. I lie, bound with heavy chains, between two great slabs of it, naked and sweating, trying to sleep through the torment of a summer's day.

They've given me the local fall-out shelter, the very deepest room they could find, as I requested. Yet my senses move easily through the earth and to the surface, out across the lazy, warm suburbs, restless emissaries skimming the sun-soaked streets. If I could rein them in I would, but the instinct that drives them is a force unto itself, a necessary consequence of what I am and the reason I was brought into being.

Being, I have discovered, has certain disadvantages. I intend seeking compensation, just as soon as the time is right.”

Neighbourhood Watch http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/NEIGHBOUR/Neighbour.html <br class="br">Fiction

“Every night, at exactly a quarter past three, something dreadful happens on the street outside our bedroom window. We peek through the curtains, yawning and shivering in the life-draining chill, and then we clamber back beneath the blankets without exchanging a word, to hug each other tightly and hope for sound sleep before it's time to rise.

Usually what we witness verges on the mundane. Drunken young men fighting, swaying about with outstretched knives, cursing incoherently. Robbery, bashings, rape. We wince to see such violence, but we can hardly be shocked or surprised any more, and we're never tempted to intervene: it's always far too cold, for a start! A single warm exhalation can coat the window pane with mist, transforming the most stomach-wrenching assault into a safely cryptic ballet for abstract blobs of light.

On some nights, though, when the shadows in the room are subtly wrong, when the familiar street looks like an abandoned film set, or a painting of itself perversely come to life, we are confronted by truly disturbing sights, oppressive apparitions which almost make us doubt we're awake, or, if awake, sane. I can't catalogue these visions, for most, mercifully, are blurred by morning, leaving only a vague uneasiness and a reluctance to be alone even in the brightest sunshine.”

Scatter My Ashes http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/HORROR/SCATTER/Scatter.html, published in Interzone (Spring 1988) <br class="br">Fiction

“Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view -- even if the experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.”

Closer
Fiction, Axiomatic (1995)

“There are times when it’s worth putting aside the endless myopic navel-gazing that occupies so much literature, in order to look out at the universe itself and value it for what it is.”

Interview with Renai LeMay http://rlemay.com.au/greg-egan-the-big-interview/ <br class="br">Other

“The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.”

New Scientist
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