Greg Bear Quotes

Grief is not productive. It simply represents an inefficiency in accepting change of status.

6. “That’s insane,” Lanier said.
“No very. It’s politics.”

Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don’t understand everything.

Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten.
It was in the blood, the flesh,
And now it is forever.

5. “Very evocative. He seems to be confirming what I said last year—that the universe really has no underpinnings, that when a good hypothesis comes along, one that explains the prior events, the underpinnings shape themselves to accommodate and a powerful theory is born.”
“Then there is no ultimate reality?”
“Apparently not. Bad hypotheses, those that don’t fit what happen on our level, are rejected by the universe. Good ones, powerful ones, are incorporated.”

Information can be stored even more compactly than in molecular memory. It can be stored in the structure of space-time. What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum?

Nothing will ever be the same again.
Good! Wonderful! Wasn’t it all badly flawed anyway?
No, perhaps not. Not until now.

He may not have had time, but even allowing him the time, Vergil simply did not think such things through. Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences.
But wasn’t that true of every creator?
Didn’t anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment?

4. “You’re a romantic, aren’t you?” she said.
“I suppose I am.”
“I am too. The silliest people in the world are romantics.”

Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them.

Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her.

3. “I’m going to take you out tonight,” he said. “Another Heisenberg dinner.”
“What’s that?”
“Uncertainty,” Edward said crisply. “We know where we are going, but not what we are going to eat. Or vice versa.”
“Sounds wonderful. Which car?”
“The Quantum, of course.”
“Oh, Lord. We just had the speedometer fixed.”
“And the steering went out?”
“Shh! It’s still working. We’re cheating.”

There is no war so important that to win it, we must destroy our minds.

We’ve been fighting for so long, we’ve begun to lose ourselves. And it’s getting worse.

She saw that in all wars, the first stage was to dehumanize the enemy, reduce the enemy to a lower level so that he might be killed without compunction. When the enemy was not human to begin with, the task was easier.