Quotes from Gregory Benford

love's from chemistry but sex is a matter of physics.

Your wife, she like a doorknob, ever'body gets a turn.

She could hear crew footsteps thumping in the corridors above.

On Friday there was a department Colloquium on plasma physics, given by Norman Rostoker. Gordon went and sat well in the back. Rostoker's first slide was: Seven Phases of the Thermonuclear Fusion Program I Exultation II Confusion III Disenchantment IV Search for the Guilty V Punishment of the Innocent VI Distinction for the Uninvolved VII Burying the Bodies/Scattering the Ashes

September 20, 1963 The telephone jangled him up from a pleasant dream. Something about the war again, but soft and warm and . . . he could remember no more. He sat up. Marthe was already in the bathroom, and the telephone's harsh clamor made him jerk it off the cradle. "Allo?" "Dr. Cohen," a thick German accent said, "I am from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper in—" "I know.

Marthe had reported back from her girl-girl talk that Elisabeth took quite calmly the immense fact that she was now venturing into the landscape where she could create another human being, a prospect that to Karl seemed more frightening than, say, getting a driver's license. All this he felt as they finished breakfast, hustled into street garb, and turned left onto boulevard Raspail.

She imagined what it was like to be a big, hairy animal, cock flopping as you walked, like a careless, unruly advertisement

For Shackleton, self-promotion had been essential all the way. He had paid all his expenses with media tie-ins, one way or another: auctioning off news and picture rights before he left, taking special postage stamps along to be franked at the south pole. After he made it, his bestseller had nine translations. He spruced up his expedition ship into a museum and charged admission.

If the all-powerful observer measured a particle and found it at position x, then the particle had to be given a small push by the observer, in the very act of observing. That was Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. You could not tell precisely how much of a push the observer had given the wretched particle, so its future position was somewhat uncertain.

German had a lumbering, bull-in-china-shop feel, yet their culture gave birth to essential words that told much of what lay within: Schadenfreude, Angst, Weltschmerz—joy at the misfortune of others, anguish, sorrow at the world—words revealing the yawning abyss in their souls? But then there was a fine word that sounded like what it meant, Gemütlichkeit. Still

Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.

There is a word for such exercises we Germans do," Canaris said. "Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past." Karl

Riemann conjecture

west. He liked the mild climate, the Sierras making it something like Colorado with a seashore. It took him several years to overcome the natural though secret belief of true New Yorkers, that people living somewhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding.

You know, I'd like to live here alone like you." "You can't." "Why not?" "If you come I'll be here and you won't be alone. Neither will I." "Well, I mean almost alone.

the Ocean of Night (1977) Across the Sea of Suns (1984) Great Sky River (1987) Tides of Light (1989) Furious Gulf (1994) Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)

Then the 1956 Peace Prize went to Eisenhower and Khrushchev for agreeing not to build the hydrogen bomb. That agreement was now also called the Szilard Treaty. Today the H-bomb was a threshold no one dared cross without exciting hostile moves by all other powers.

Freeman murmured at his elbow, "Let him go. I'm working on an even bigger nuclear rocket, called Orion. We might take a cruise out to Saturn on it by the 1980s or

Sour grapes, the champagne of the intelligentsia.

You could say whatever you liked to them and they would not take you seriously, not even take offense—as long as you told the strict truth. They never recognized it.

Beth sent on comm, "Guests? We're immigrants. This is some kind of entrance exam?

Money is not the value for which goods are exchanged, but the value by which they are exchanged

As we had drilled for, over years.

They thought the Allies would be desperate to "buy" their reactor research in the postwar era. Apparently they were not moved to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and the depression and desperation one hears them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals their sudden irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: "If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you're all second-raters." The