Rudy Rucker

"This is just so typical of you, Alwin, to be in love with a giant ass."

"The fifties were supposed to be a golden age when the pig had everything his way. That's what TV and the government wants us to believe: there was a time when no one made trouble. What about Kerouac, you assholes? What about Neal?"

"Was I to be Earth's first casualty in the Attack of the Giant Ass From Hilbert Space?"

"At the most elemental level, reality evanesces into something called Schröedinger's Wave Function: a mathematical abstraction which is best represented as a pattern in an infinite-dimensional space, Hilbert Space. Each point of the Hilbert Space represents a possible state of affairs. The wave function for some one physical or mental system takes the form of, let us say, a coloring in of Hilbert Space. The brightly colored parts represent likely states for the system, the dim parts represent less probable states of affairs."

"The matter of color is more confusing. Not every property of a system can be stated as a definite spatio-temporal state of affairs. A system's tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A . . . a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall gestalts in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green light might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause."

"For whatever reason, we find it easier to "read" Hilbert Space patterns in terms of time. Yet the patterns exist outside of time. Thinking timelessly is not some unusual skill; when you remember last night's supper you sense a whole and not a chew-by-chew replay. To know a novel's action is to grasp the four-dimensional spacetime whole described."

"Don't you think women would like a man's head that always listens to them and agrees?"

"Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles."

"There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not . . . alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here."

"I knew you’d say that. You’re so anal, Fletcher. Too much math."

"The government had recently repealed all speed limits in an attempt to boost oil consumption."

"Oh, yeah, she told me about that. I think mysticism’s a bunch of crap. All religions are a bunch of crap."

"I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace."

"This provender was at a double remove from reality; it was artificially made food that had been further treated in an attempt to make it healthy."

"I’ve never seen a religion that wasn’t basically evil."

"“Now that’s a fib, I know,” said the black woman. “Is you folks preachers?”"

"It’s perfect, isn’t it? It just goes to show that everything I’ve ever said about religion is true. The sky’s the limit when it comes to religious stupidity. Here we have a race of alien invaders, and the evangelical true believers are flocking here to get taken over."

"Anyone who’d volunteer for alien domination doesn’t really deserve to have his or her freedom."

"“I’ll wish for ten million more bucks while I’m at it.” “And immortality?” “No, no. I don’t want to live forever. Death’s the only thing that keeps me going.”"

"The surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time."

"“What’s superspace?” I felt around for my body and couldn’t find it. “Thoughtland, Fletch, the cosmos. Pure mentation. Abstract possibility. Infinite dimensions. The class of all sets. God’s mind. The pre-geometric substratum. Hilbert space. Penultimate reality. White...” “Cut the crap, Harry.”"

"My roommate says anyone who mails bombs to computer scientists can’t be all bad."

"Mother Nature doesn’t want power-tripping greedheads looking up her skirts."

"People always have bad news for you when they call you “sir.”"

"“Do you know computer science?” “I know it’s for lamers who can’t handle real math.”"

"Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control."

"There’s only one way that people change the past, Bela. They stop thinking about it. They move on."

"In a sense mathematics is quite objective: the same deductions can become known to everyone who starts with the same axioms and definitions; the same abstract forms can be universally perceived. So it’s perfectly possible to talk math with a cockroach from Galaxy Z."

"It was odd, odd, odd to see people die. The world rolled on the same as before, as heedlessly as if a person were an ant or a wildflower or a puff of wind. Nature kept on making more and more of everything, and never mind that birth is a death sentence. And now that I’d been to La Hampa, I knew that creation was even more prodigal than I’d ever imagined. There were worlds upon worlds filled with people struggling and swarming like fretful gnats, all of them doomed to vanish into dust while the cosmic dance spun on."

"In the 1970s I even got to meet Kurt Gödel a few times. The king of the logicians. Gödel once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.” By this he meant that pure logic can take you farther than you might believe possible."

"So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?” Reality is made of gnarly computations."

"The meaning of life is beauty and love."

"See the gnarl. The air is a gnarly ocean; the leaves dance on the trees. I’ve always enjoyed watching clouds and water; and now I realize that the computations they’re carrying out are fully as complex as anything in any book I might read. Each flickering shadow is a reminder of the world’s unsolvable and unpredictable richness."

"One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect."