Vernor Vinge Quotes

Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

So high, so low, so many things to know.

The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat.

This was the sort of desperate hallucination he must guard against. If you raise your desires high enough, certainty can grow out of the background noise.

Didn’t Underhill understand? All decent societies agreed on basic issues, things that meant the healthy survival of their people. Things might be changing, but it was self-serving nonsense to throw the rules overboard.

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.

Our system is founded on the Concept of Chaos. The universe is basically a dark and Unhappy place—a place where evil and injustice and randomness rule. The ironic thing is that the very act of organization creates the potential for even greater ruin. Social organizations have a natural tendency to become monopolistic and inflexible. When they finally break down, it is a catastrophic debacle. So, we must except a great deal of disorder and violence in our lives if we are to avoid a complete blow up later.

Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction. Sooner or later, it ossified and politics carried it into a fall.

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

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.

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.

Even as my conscious mind concluded that we were under fire, I threw myself on the ground and flatten into the lowest profile possible. You’ve heard the bromide about combat making life more real. I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly true that when you are flat against the ground with your face in the dirt, the whole universe looks different.

What do you do when your dream dies?

Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage.

They’re very good at reaching nonsense conclusions from insufficient information.