Shipstar Quotes

“A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“When the chemistry is right, all the experiments work.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Remember that people break down, too, not just machinery.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“It is better to be wrong than to be vague. In trial and error, the error is the true essential. —FREEMAN DYSON”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been. —THEODORE VON KÁRMÁN”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Flattery isn’t the highest compliment – parasitism is.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Remembering a narrative alters it.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery. —ANAÏS NIN”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“If humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good old running.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Right. Isn’t that how science works?” Redwing grinned. “If you don’t understand, do an experiment.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Try to get all your posthumous medals in advance.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Terrors can be mirrors, too.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted.
To wake up from cold sleep and go into that, fresh from the gewgaws and flashy bubble gum of techno-Earth, was – well, a consummation requiring digestion.
She could see that Redwing worried at this, could not let it go. Neither could she. Vexing thoughts came, flying strange and fragrant through her mind, but they were not problems, no. They were the shrapnel you carried, buried deep, wounds from meeting the strange.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“To Memor philosophy was like a blind being searching a dark room for an unknown, black beast. When philosophy verged into theology, it was like the same predicament, but the black beast did not even exist.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“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.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“abstract himself out of the moment”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar

“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.”
― Gregory Benford, Shipstar