Julia

“Even if a universes's life span is calculable , the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we've led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable... The fact that it {universe} spawned such plenitude is a miracle...”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation

“If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

“There are more possible ways to play a game og chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.
Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling