She had learned at an early age that it was not how often you were wrong that counted in science, but how often you were right. One startling hit cov… - Michael Swanwick

She had gone rafting down the Eden. She had faced down the largest animals ever to walk the Earth. She had tended to a dying woman in her final days and nursed an ailing man back to health. She had known tears and laughter, toil, love, sweat, and danger.
These were the primal satisfactions, the things that made life matter. What did Washington, D.C., in the twenty-first century have to offer that could compare with them?

“That’s impossible.”
“Only to small minds,” Gertrude said.

Common sense has very little to do with physics.