Charles Sheffield

That’s the trouble with the younger generation. They don’t understand why a thing can’t be done, so they go ahead and do it.

“Did you do what I asked you to?”

“As much as I could. Have you ever tried to brief your boss, without telling her what’s going on?”

“A hundred times. It’s the first rule of self-preservation.”

“Hormones are everything, Turpin,” she said to the bird on her shoulder. “Brains are nice, and looks are nice, and logic’s even nicer; but hormones run the show. For everyone, even for me and you.”

The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting that the entire rest of the history of the universe.

The Asteroid Belt contains everything from substantial bodies like Ceres, seven hundred and fifty kilometers across, all the way down to house-sized boulders, pebbles, and grains of sand. One good rule of thumb is that for every object of a given size, there will be ten times as many one-third that size.

The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.

I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them.

War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer.

We got the way we are, Jeanie, because life on Earth is one long fight for limited resources. Our bloody-mindedness all started out as food battles, three billion years ago.

You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.

And there you had it. Most people hate to learn that they are wrong. Not McAndrew. When he’s proved wrong, he’s ecstatic. It means he’s learned something new, and that’s his main reason for existence.

They saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia.