Charles Sheffield Quotes

Kallik’s explanation was neat, logical, and complete. Like most such explanations, it was, in Hans Rebka’s view, almost certainly wrong. That was not the way the real world operated.

We're all here," said Louis Nenda's voice.
"Where's here? Can you see?"
"Not a thing. Black as a politician's heart.

Hans Rebka sat on a rounded pyramid never designed for contact with the human posterior, and thought about luck.
There was good luck, which mostly happened to other people. And there was bad luck, which usually happened to you. Sometimes, through observation, guile, and hard work, you could avoid bad luck—even make it look like good luck, to others. But you would know the difference, even if no one else did.
Well, suppose that for a change good luck came your way. How should you greet that stranger to your house? You could argue that its arrival was inevitable, that the laws of probability insisted that good and bad must average out over long enough times and large enough samples. Then you could welcome luck in, and feel pleased that your turn had come round at last.
Or you could hear what Hans Rebka was hearing: the small, still voice breathing in his ear, telling him that this good luck was an impostor, not to be trusted.

Darya had a few moments of wild hope before logic intruded.

What I found was worse than diversity—it was insanity.

Nothing was more fascinating than information. It was infinite in quantity, or effectively so, limited only by the total entropy of the universe; it was vastly diverse and various; it was eternal; It was available for collection, anywhere and anytime. And, perhaps best of all, E. C. Tally thought with the largest amount of self-satisfaction that his circuits permitted, you never knew when it might come in useful.

Darya was beginning to understand why she might be ruined forever for academic life. Certainly, the world of ideas had its own pleasures and thrills. But surely there was nothing to compete with the wonderful feeling of being alive, after knowing without a shadow of doubt that you would be dead in one second.

But no one, no matter how intelligent, could make good inferences from bad data.

If you win too easy, better ask what’s going on that you don’t know about.

Darya found the logic of her thought processes so compelling that it never occurred to her that others might have a different reaction. But they did.

The answers come pat and fast. You see, what the downsiders want isn’t an explanation; it’s a catchphrase they can use instead of an explanation.

Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice—and live or die with whatever you had thrown.

Old habits did not just die hard. They refused to die at all.

Darya stood up, heard her voice rising, and knew she was doing what she insisted what a scientist should never do: allowing passion and the defense of personal theories to interfere with logical analysis.

Don’t confuse caution with cowardice.