Quotes from Greg Bear

It is the bullet you don't hear that gets you.

I'm still out there. In my head. I have to sort it out or I'll never come home.

Once again, human history proved that the worst mistake possible in politics was underestimating one's opponents. Van

She didn't want to change just to be better. Though there was always better to aspire for. It was very confused.

Odd how food and water and a clean body—and a few moments of rest—lead me into philosophy.

Oh, there will still be deception. The fresh crew will emerge as adults, will have memories of past training and lives. Our stories, our lives, will go on. I refuse to allow that love to die, just because it was never real.

almost every living cell there was already a functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information. What was reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability?

angrier and angrier, that he had to do such things because men were filled with arrogant greed, because some wished to rule with neither the wit nor the self-knowledge to see their inadequacies—and how many of their people would die.

she has these strange gray eyes that let me see all the way back to when her scorn shaped men's lives.

Desert and Death Valley were the Mecca and Al Medina

Memory is stored in neurons—interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells.

After things settle down, we can all take our turn sticking our heads through the hole in the Sisyphus mural.

challenge and difficulty mattered less to the great majority than accomplishment and gain

I've seen one kind of stupid, and another. We all bump into each other every day of our lives, by guess and by golly, and we render our opinions whether we know anything or not, and if anybody catches us out we lie … Ah, shit on it." He shook his head. "I'm just feeling uncommonly sour today.

sanity is really limiting.

Universes may co-exist in the same wave-train, operating as the harmonics of a complex of frequencies. Analogous to the groove in a phonograph record, which is easily distinguished into horns and strings by the practiced ear—horns one universe, strings another. We may exist in all universes, but 'hear' only one because of our limitations, the valve of our desires, our practical, physical needs.

he regarded the massive destruction of space war, the necessary total vanquishing of an enemy, as an essentially immoral act. Yet he desired justice for the Earth's murder as much as any of the children

Louis Slotin, at Los Alamos in 1946.

Humans believe in nothingness, in zeros. It is one of their distinguishing traits. They keep inventing nothing. Forerunners know otherwise.

I'm not sure how I see things anymore," Mitch said. "Having your body jerked around by nature is sobering. Women experience it more directly, but this has got to be a first for the men.

Maybe it was the world that was screwy, that set traps and snares and forced people to make bad choices.

For years I've been waiting for nature to react to our environmental bullshit, tell us to stop overpopulating and depleting resources, to shut up and stop messing around and just die. Species-level apoptosis. I think this could be the final warning—a real species killer.

It was when a society became most distressed and antiquated that it would recreate an overwhelming fantasy of some Golden Age, a time when all was great and glorious, when people were more noble and causes more magnificent and honorable.

human or animal