Quotes from Gregory Benford

I have an allergy to dogma, including my own.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, thought as a child, behaved as a child. But when I became a woman, I put away manly things.

Tests showed there was no enrichment. "They're just slinging purified uranium at us, straight from the mines," Bob said. But the next week Bob fell ill. A red rash spread from his face all over his body. The bumps were as big as marbles and itched "like the bejesus," he said in a feverish daze. He died two days later of smallpox. •

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

I know that humans are fond of seeing their kind rendered in other media.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Sir, 'pessimist' is a term invented by optimists to describe realists.

Your conflicts reflect subminds in dispute. Such is the human condition

Still, he reminded himself, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

How human, to ruminate even when in mortal danger

You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart, a wound that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

Moe Berg. Until he's finished reading a paper, he considers it 'alive' and refuses to let anyone else touch it. When he's done, it's 'dead' and anybody can read it. Says he wants to integrate everything from various papers, get a picture—every day." "Then

You speak French and Italian?" Moe lounged back, crossing long legs. "Having been acquainted for years with that beautiful creature known as Latin, I try to savor its ornate, loquacious offspring. Yet the French accent eludes me." Karl smiled. Somehow this big guy with an easy, sliding smile and precise diction made you like him. Presence, that's it. "My wife can help you with that. Have dinner with us." Moe Berg

Karl and Marthe held the embossed card gingerly. It was Hitler's 1941 Christmas card, a photo of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an ancient Greek statue the Wehrmacht had taken from the Louvre. His greeting was printed: Our Winged Victory. Beneath that was a scrawl with only the A and H legible. "He . . . touched this," Marthe said. Her hands shook, nearly dropping the card.

To hide in the Mesh, software broke his simulation up into pieces which could run in different processing centers. Each fragment buried itself deep in a local algorithm. To a maintenance program, the pirated space looked like a subroutine running normally. Such masked bins even seemed to be optimizing performance: disguise was the essential trick.

Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. —MULLAH NASRUDIN, 1200s AD

abstract himself out of the moment

Karl remembered his great truth, learned in the project: Never pass by a chance to shut up.

Cat said, "So we're to host disgusting alien bags of bacteria that just spew it out in all directions?

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said "an unhappy childhood." Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that's how novels worked.

who could visualize four-dimensional surfaces in a non-Euclidean geometry

emerges from logic, not desire.

She felt a heady kinesthetic rush of acceleration as a constellation of fusions drew her to a tight nexus.

In return it had used the energies to rebroadcast itself and its owners' Message.