Quotes from Charles Sheffield

Remember, an easy question can have an easy answer. But a hard question must have a hard answer. And for the hardest questions of all, there may be no answer - except faith.

I'm getting old, thought Eileen Calder. Old and worn out and cynical. And being cynical is a lot worse than being old or worn out.

Sometimes I think about dying. And then I wonder about going to hell. And then I think that if and when I go there, the place will be completely organized and run by lost souls, with a council and a works committee and an ethics panel, and I'll feel right at home.

La vida, si no es una gloriosa aventura, no es nada».

A joke was the best barometer for mental weather.

I'm fat...I regard that as healthy. Good food wards off disease. - Dr. Erasmus Darwin

Education isn't like a video, with a beginning and a middle and an end. It has a beginning, then it keeps going until you're dead. If it stops you are dead, even if you don't know it.

the writer liked machines and people who work with machines, he respected what they do, and he wrote poems showing that the lives of engineers and miners and pilots have their own excitement and romance.

From Aftermath: Dr. Oldfield "Single celled and oceanic forms will presumably survive but it might make life impossible for humans." President Saul: "Actually, that tends to be my primary concern. Sponges and oysters will have to take care of themselves.

there is a branch of science called geobotany. It is a way of looking for minerals by knowing that certain plants will only grow in their presence or absence, and sometimes by knowing that the plants themselves concentrate particular minerals in their leaves and stems.

you were being strangled by the biggest, most inefficient, best entrenched bureaucratic system in the history of the world. You were in school, adrift within an education system that had lost any interest in the value of knowledge, or truth, or discipline, or self-evaluation. Like all monopolies, it was more interested in perpetuating and protecting its own territory than in anything else.

Jeff wished he were a computer himself. It sounded so calm and certain. He, as usual, was terrified.

Era fuerte cuando él estaba débil, cortésmente débil cuando era él el fuerte.