Vernor Vinge Quotes

Viki was awed by all the incredible quackery. Daddy thought such things were amusing—“like religion but not so deadly.”

Politics may come and go, but trade goes on forever.

What do you do when your dream dies?
Dreams die in every life. Everyone gets old. There is promise in the beginning when life seems so bright. The promise fades when the years get short.

Over the last twenty years, the worldwide net had come to be a midden of bogus sites and recursive fraudulence…telling truth from fantasy was often the hardest thing about using the web.

Technical people don’t make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart.

Wil wondered fleetingly if she might be psychopathic, and not merely young and naive.

If during the last thousand seconds you have received any High-Beyond-protocol packets from "Arbitration Arts," discard them at once. If they have been processed, then the processing site and all locally netted sites must be physically destroyed at once. We realize that this means the destruction of solar systems, but consider the alternative. You are under Transcendent attack.

All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge....And now revenge was all that life had left for him.

What do you do when your dream dies?

So what do you do when your dream dies?
When your dream dies, you give it up.

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind—but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.

The more you realized what the stars really were, the more you realized what the universe must really be.

Poor humans; they will all die.
"Poor us; we will not."

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for. From this era on, I think invention will be the parent of necessity—and not the other way around.

Some dreams take a long time in dying. Some get a last minute reprieve…and that can be even worse.