Vernor Vinge Quotes

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

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe.

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

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

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

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

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

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It’s passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it.

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.”

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.

Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education, which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable—all without losing their moral compass.

Every state religion he’d ever seen had a core of hypocrisy. That was why he’d been against bringing “Hrala” ashore—he knew the priests would never accept their theology suddenly incarnate.

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

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