Vernor Vinge Quotes

Peregrine Wickwrackscar was flying. A pilgrim with legends that went back almost a thousand years—and not one of them could come near to this!

There may have been some time in the past when a group calling themselves astrologers could produce results. I don’t know, and the matter doesn’t interest me, for I live in the present. In our time the men working in the name of astrology are incapable of producing results, are conscious frauds.

Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such—and those living more peaceably around them—we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

Quit crossing your fingers, Wim; the only thing that’ll ever save you from is the respect of educated men.

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.

That was the old saying: Once your secret is outed anywhere, however briefly, it is outed forever. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Juan. “The way to cover a slip is to embellish it, hide it in all sorts of fake secrets.”

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.

There was an old Qeng Ho saying, “You know you’ve stayed too long when you start using the locals’ calendar.”

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Pham was overwhelmed by the other things that Gunnar Larson had to say, the advice that might be worthless but that had the stench of wisdom.

Hexapodia as the key insight...
I haven’t had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs?

One of his many mottos was, “If you didn’t figure it out yourself, you don’t understand it.”

There is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever.

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as long as all the time before.

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