Quotes from Greg Bear

Jesus, you're morbid." "It is, though, ain't it?" "Yeah," Jerry said. He grunted and stooped lower. "We're behaving like idiots. Why this mound, and why now?" "You picked it out." "And I don't know why. Maybe no reason at all.

Faith in Life.

We used to think the aliens would be like angels, or like demons," Kumar says. "I was raised on those fantasies. But Gurus are neither. They are in show business—arranging to get us to kill each other in ingenious and protracted ways to provide entertainment for heartless armchair rats.

The stars behind the glowing, swelling Earth suddenly filled with menace; he imagined them as the glints of wolves' eyes in an infinite night-bound forest.

Kaye glared at him for a moment, both challenged and exasperated. "We don't have to posit self-awareness, conscious thought, to have an organized network that responds to its environment and issues judgments about what its individual nodes should look like," Kaye said.

We survived the Shaping Sickness. Forerunners hoped to learn the secret of how we survived the Shaping Sickness, but we would not give it to them, even under torture!

Washington eats truth and shits spin.

chocolate sprinkles on rhubarb sauce over vanilla ice cream.

What I could not understand was why the Didact had decided to save one of those very weapons whose creation he had so decisively opposed.

In a world of fragile self-justification, the truth made no one happy.

There are points in life when everything changes, and changes in a big way. The old sophistic texts refer to these points as synchrons. Synchrons supposedly tie great forces and personalities together. You can't predict them and you can't avoid them.

Marty knew about rituals. "That means we're supposed to do something a certain way so we won't feel guilty," he said. "You got it," Harry said. Marty

nonsense? Yet as it collapsed, it did not take the calm or sense of mastery with it; they remained. They had built a boat, crossed a river, and

All dreams are young, my host, my friend. All dreams belong to youth, whether they be nightmares or idylls.

Much of official Washington had seemed to come to a standstill. With the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House in open conflict now, such petty considerations as budgets had to wait.

This is not irony; it is echo. The way of the Mantle. If we who are honored with life do not perceive the obvious, then we are forced to live it again, around another corner, from another angle.

Their math lacks integers!" "As far as we can tell," Jennifer added. "They don't use whole numbers at all. Only 'smears,' they call them.

Having undergone that disintegration and dying of past individuals and rebirth into something vastly more powerful, all these creatures had joined millions of years before into its own early Gravemind, far more than the sum of its parts.

Work, fight, live. All the sweeter. Mind after mind will shape and absorb. In the end, all will be quiet with wisdom.

I wondered if one's life history was the result of world-lines collapsing in response to simple force of character. The dilemma had not been solved in a thousand years of human philosophy.

Smart man to admit he's an idiot

UR-DIDACT: This being was not the Primordial I encountered on Charum Hakkor, but something else entirely—though it retained the Primordial's motives and thoughts and memories. It was a Gravemind—the Gravemind, more accurately. It was the Primordial's final act of revenge.

Christians in Green Idaho, practically a nation unto itself within the United States, had declared the rights of women to be less than those of men. Women fought to have their legal powers and rights reduced, despite opposition from all other states.

Living things see only the surface, can't exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible, depth and death sounding so much alike … There