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“But I still feel like it’s my fault.”
Dana nodded. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”

— Ted Chiang Exhalation: Stories (2019)

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More quotes by Ted Chiang

Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.

Exhalation: Stories (2019)

The universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological.

Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.

Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.

Exhalation: Stories (2019)

But the church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not.

Exhalation: Stories (2019)

All Ted Chiang quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ted Chiang (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.