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If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

— 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)

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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.