Louisa Hall > Quotes

“We can break step. Magnificent living beings that we are, we humans are free to unravel our patterns.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“If there's one thing I've learned through my years of mistakes, it's that even the most perfect patterns becomes false when it goes unbroken for too long.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“And what if they took over? What if they relieved us of power? We tend to assume that sentient machines would be inevitably demonic. But what if they were responsible leaders? Could they do much worse than we’ve done? They would immediately institute a system of laws. The constitution would be algorithmic. They would govern the world according to functions and the axioms their programmers gave them.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“One becomes accustomed to one's solitude, and it begins to seem rather phony to try to reach out.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“When I say something, I mean it, whether or not it's the right answer. When I tell you I love you I mean it.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“I understood that ideal conversations move in widening spirals, starting with the minute then building toward statements of greater importance. The problem, however, is that conversations too often stay flat. It is distressing how often we repeat ourselves. When we ask questions, we know the answers already. We’ve grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“. . .poetry by Eliot. There's a lulling thing in his voice that makes me feel as if a spell has been cast that shall wake us all so that we might fly out of the mirror and speak to each other clearly at last.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“Of what importance are the thwarted desires of awkward young men, when the oceans are rising, the deserts are coming, and families are trading their freedoms for houses?”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“And after all we've been through this century, would it be so terrible, to see the end of man's unquestioned dominance? I find it hard to believe that a machine, programmed for equanimity and rational synthesis, could ever act as maleficent as we humans have already proven ourselves capable of acting. I fail to summon the specter of a machine more harmful than Hitler or Mussolini. And yet perhaps its our own nature that gives us concern. We know how badly we might treat such a creature, and it's difficult to believe the end will be happy. But that, you know, would be our own damned fault, and certainly not the machines'.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“They felt their cruelties had no implications. They excluded me with no sense of scale. I at least knew my importance.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“Our primary function is speech: questions, and responses selected from memory according to a formula. We speak, but there is little evidence of real comprehension.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“I fretted so much about my earthly interactions that I had very few interactions to speak of.”
― Louisa hall

“Our faces turned upwards, together we scanned the heavens, finding them stacked with tiers of bright stars.

Remarked to Whittier: It almost seems that each star is a hole, through which we might vanish into other dark heavens.

Whittier remained silent. Whole night seemed to wait for his response, and while I also waited, was taken with a sudden suspicion that our blue sky, that seems so solid during the day, might be in fact riddled with piercings, and rendered therefore exceeding fragile. As if the great dome above us might be nothing more than a swathe of soft linen, billowing up with the wind.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“Unlike computers, we're not bound to count rach second correctly. We're at liberty to accord each moment it's proper weight, depending on its meaning to us. Permit me, then, to lengthen the moment when I fell in love woth Dolores.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“They also reminded me of my husband’s. ONCE WE STARTED TALKING, IT TOOK LITTLE TO PROMPT HIM TO continue. One question led to many answers. Often he returned to the subject of physics. He stressed what that new science had meant to him as a young man: the great shift in his mind-set that it had produced, to understand that any given entity can only be defined as a function of its observer. To come to the realization that the very aim of understanding an individual unit might be inherently impossible. It had alleviated, he told me, his loneliness. It had caused him to understand that he could only ever know himself as part of a system. As a young man, he was saying, he’d immediately understood the new physics to be less in line with Western religion than it was with philosophies from the East, in which the immeasurable was regarded as the primary reality. In Sanskrit, he said, the root for the verb to measure was the same as the root for illusion. The truth of this relation, he said, had been demonstrated by quantum theory. To measure any aspect of the world, he said, was to pull an individual unit apart from the whole flow of a system, a flow of which that individual unit was an integral part, and which defined that individual unit as integrally as its own characteristics.”
― Louisa Hall, Trinity

“If I could take back the decision to come here, I would. I'd take her back out to the city. I'd put her in a bigger world, even if it was dangerous and ugly a lot of the time, so she'd have other things to love besides that catty girlfriend of hers, and those shifty-eyed boys.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“They all parrot Professor Jefferson's remarks, spouting his theories about how a machine that can't write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of emotions actually felt can't be said to have true human intellect. But again, what a dangerous game! Picking and choosing who feels emotions. How can we ever tell that the loss of a loved one affect someone else as intensely as it affects us? We must assume it, as you assumed my hurt after Chris passed, when you brought me along to Gibraltar although I'd never composed a sonnet, and although tests had never been done on my brain to ensure how deeply I felt. We should all extend such a courtesy.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“Unlike computers, we're not bound to count each second correctly. We're at liberty to accord each moment it's proper weight, depending on its meaning to us. Permit me, then, to lengthen the moment when I fell in love woth Dolores.”
― Louisa Hall, Speak

“One thing is certain: your essence in my life is essential. It has been from the beginning. Even when I was a kid, it was as if I were waiting for you to enter the picture. Starting over in a new country, adjusting to the strange calm that takes hold when you've left everything that defines you, I had the feeling of weightless suspension. It stayed with me until the day I met you.”
― Louisa Hall

“I'd learned my lesson well by that point. Why make a bad situation worse by calling it names to its face?”
― Louisa Hall, Speak