Greg Egan Quotes

She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.

Above or Love, Hope, Hate or Fear, It lives all passionless and pure: An age shall fleet like earthly year; Its years in moments shall endure. Away, away, without a wing, O'er all, through all, its thought shall fly; A nameless and eternal thing, Forgetting what it was to die.

The soul is not ruled by time and space. The soul is infinite. It blends with the One in infinity.

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

A vampire, like a lady, never reveals his true age.

Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

God is unlimited and infinite with respect to time; He is eternal. God is unlimited and unaffected by space; He is present everywhere at the same time.

Expenditure--like ugliness and errors--becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity.

I thought it odd that the woman was over a thousand years old but thought the microwave was primitive.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

I don't have a message. You already have all these people telling you how to live, who to be, what to wear, what to drive, what drugs to do - I just want people to see what I see.

The world is right because I feel good. p. 83, Awareness, copyright 1990

How old is she now?" he asked. "Hard to say. She was a tree for a while. Now she's immortal.

Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.

Time means little; I never notice its passing.

We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

I've been around for a very long time, I've been around since God had baby cheeks.

People make their own reality. That was what Praxis had taught him years ago. A hundred people can witness the exact same event, and give two hundred and three different accountings of it.

It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.