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Rudy Rucker Quotes

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb. Wikipedia  

✵ 22. March 1946  •  Other names 魯迪·拉克
Rudy Rucker photo

Works

Mathematicians in Love
Rudy Rucker: 27 quotes0 likes

Famous Rudy Rucker Quotes

“Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling... as if she were a person in a book.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 103

“The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 107

“I stared down at the object in my lap. A skin-colored sphere the size of a giant beach ball, with breasts on top and a mouth between the breasts. At the bottom were the generous buttocks, a crinkly anus and a vaginal passage containing my rapidly limpening penis. Was this safe?”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 65

“There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not... alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 171

“It was funny. I knew I didn't want the bomb to be a success. But yet I'd spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn't stand not to do it right.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 68

“My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 18

Rudy Rucker Quotes about time

“For whatever reason, we find it easier to "read" Hilbert Space patterns in terms of time. Yet the patterns exist outside of time. Thinking timelessly is not some unusual skill; when you remember last night's supper you sense a whole and not a chew-by-chew replay. To know a novel's action is to grasp the four-dimensional spacetime whole described.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 135

“The fifties were supposed to be a golden age when the pig had everything his way. That's what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal?”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 130

“The matter of color is more confusing. Not every property of a system can be stated as a definite spatio-temporal state of affairs. A system's tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A... a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall gestalts in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green light might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 134

“The surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time.”

Rudy Rucker book Master of Space and Time

Source: Master of Space and Time (1984), Chapter 23, “The Way Uptown” (p. 180)

Rudy Rucker Quotes about women

“Not only am I scared of big, strong men, I'm scared of mean little women. It's just little skinny men and nice big women that I get along with.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 40

“Don't you think women would like a man's head that always listens to them and agrees?”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 153

“Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 153-154

Rudy Rucker Quotes

“A person's lifeworm is a tangle of atomic worldlines. A braid. The dotty little atoms trace out smooth lines in spacetime: you are the pattern that these lines make up. there is no one single atom that is exclusively yours. I breathe an atom out, you breathe it in. Your garbage helps my tomatoes grow. And so the little spacetime threads weave us all together. The human race is a single vast tapestry, linked by our shared food and air. There are larger links as well: sperm, egg and umblilicus. Each family tree is an organic whole. Your spacetime body tapers back to the threads of mother's egg and father's sperm. And children, if you have them, are forever rooted in your flesh.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 108

“At first the tumbling had me totally disoriented. With each degree that I turned, the images around me would deform and change. Three given blobs might split or merge to two or five, while some other shape's angular facets would sprout interlocking crystals. It was a little like trying to make out a human body by watching a Carousel slideshow of three hundred sixty microtomed cross sections.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 106

“But after a while, some higher brain-center cut in, and I began being mentally able to fit the wildly changing scenery into a coherent four-dimensional whole. The process was really no more devious than the process by which one integrates the two hundred lines of a TV screen into a single two-dimensional image... which in turn is interpreted as a three-dimensional scene. It's just a matter of processing information. Impossible? I saw.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 106

“Amazing, the respect that nuclear weapons bring.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 74

“At the most elemental level, reality evanesces into something called Schröedinger's Wave Function: a mathematical abstraction which is best represented as a pattern in an infinite-dimensional space, Hilbert Space. Each point of the Hilbert Space represents a possible state of affairs. The wave function for some one physical or mental system takes the form of, let us say, a coloring in of Hilbert Space. The brightly colored parts represent likely states for the system, the dim parts represent less probable states of affairs.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 133-134

“I had formed a vague idea that the sex sphere was a hypersphere extending into the fourth dimension. Which meant that if the sphere's giant cunt swallowed me I could end up somewhere very... different.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 84

“I'm not a brave man. My self-image is of a very small and weak person. In point of fact, I'm almost six feet, and solidly built. But I was a late bloomer. I spent those formative early high-school years as a pudgy little science whimp. I'm still scared of big men with deep voices.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 13

“This is just so typical of you, Alwin, to be in love with a giant ass.”

Rudy Rucker

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 111

“Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control.”

Rudy Rucker book Mathematicians in Love

Source: Mathematicians in Love (2006), Chapter 4, “Hypertunnel at the Tang Fat Hotel” (p. 151)

“Do you know computer science?”

Rudy Rucker book Mathematicians in Love

“I know it’s for lamers who can’t handle real math.”
Source: Mathematicians in Love (2006), Chapter 3, “Rocking with Washer Drop” (p. 137)

“People always have bad news for you when they call you “sir.””

Rudy Rucker book Mathematicians in Love

Source: Mathematicians in Love (2006), Chapter 3, “Rocking with Washer Drop” (p. 101)

“Mother Nature doesn’t want power-tripping greedheads looking up her skirts.”

Rudy Rucker book Mathematicians in Love

Source: Mathematicians in Love (2006), Chapter 2, “Cone Shell Aliens” (p. 59)

“Anyone who’d volunteer for alien domination doesn’t really deserve to have his or her freedom.”

Rudy Rucker book Master of Space and Time

Source: Master of Space and Time (1984), Chapter 16, “Blue Gluons” (p. 126)

“I’ve never seen a religion that wasn’t basically evil.”

Rudy Rucker book Master of Space and Time

Source: Master of Space and Time (1984), Chapter 10, “God’s Laws” (p. 72)

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