Stephen Baxter Quotes

He dug into the ground until he came up with a stone the size of his thumbnail. “—if the universe was the size of this rock, then each star would be the size of a quark.”

No organization was a rational place. Organizations were bear pits where people fought for their own projects, which might or might not have something to do with the organization’s supposed mission. The wise person accepted that, and found a way to get what she wanted in spite of it all.

Like all the works of man, I saw, even these great structures were transient chimeras, destined to impermanence compared to the chthonian patience of the land.

Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own.

Anyhow, that’s our story. And I think, in my glimpses of the great encompassing mechanism that has shaped us all, I’ve seen a little of the numinous. That’s enough of God for me.

Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating.

They talked further, an incoherent conversation of disconnected fragments, peppered by misunderstanding, suffused by mistrust.

Hutton became very critical of a system where appointments depended not on merit but on the support of those in power. Of one possible opening for Watt he wrote, ‘I think it only needs to have a man properly bestir himself but that is what few political people do unless to serve themselves.’

My fear was gone, to be replaced by a numbing sense of tedium: it is remarkable how rapidly the human mind can accommodate the most remarkable of changed circumstances.

One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms.

Let me face bare-handed a dozen highly trained and fully armed gladiators, each with a personal grudge against me, than a lawyer with a single pointed question.

Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too.

“I don’t believe this for a second,” Emma said flatly.
“It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,” said Cornelius.

Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were.

The last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star.
Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say.
The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.