David Brin

Quotes

1. “Huh,” Sepak thought, marveling how much one could learn by just sitting still and observing. It wasn’t a skill one learned in the frenetic pace of modern society.

   p. 501

2. 

   Apocalypses, apparently, are subject to fashion like everything else. What terrifies one generation can seem obsolete and trivial to the next. Take our modern attitude toward war. Most anthropologists now think this activity was based originally on theft and rape—perhaps rewarding enterprises for some caveman or Viking, but no longer either sexy or profitable in the context of nuclear holocaust! Today, we look back on large-scale warfare as an essentially silly enterprise.

   p. 48

3. 

   It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem—if not generally solved—did appear to have tractable special solutions.

   p. 236

4. 

   History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.

   p. 656

5. 

   From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.

   p. 250

6. 

   What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.

   p. 187

7. 

   Ideologies are too seductive anyway. It does a man good to see things from a different point of view.

   p. 328

8. 

   Nelson replayed his last musings to himself, and silently laughed. Listen to you! Jen was right. You're a born philosopher. In other words, full of shit.

   p. 631

9. 

   It was a queer, disturbing instant of recognition. We all create monsters in our minds. The only important difference may be which of us let our monsters become real.

   p. 145

10. 

    Nation states are archaic leftovers from when each man feared the tribe over the hill, an attitude we can’t afford anymore.

    p. 539

11. 

    There’s no urgency, a third voice urged, pleading compromise. No duty calls. Hold onto the illusion a little longer.

    So she tried to go on pretending. After all, can’t believing sometimes make dreams come true?

    No, it can’t. Besides, you're awake now.

    p. 353

12. 

    It could be worse. I can’t think how right now, but I’m sure it could be worse.

    p. 74