# Quote — Gregory Benford, The Sunborn

> They had a legend about a Chemical pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way—Diminished to extinction! Apparently a commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity emerged from its full subtraction—to claim life again. Such a desperate story! Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course.

- Author: [Gregory Benford](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-benford.md)
- Book: [The Sunborn](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-benford/the-sunborn.md)
- Page: 279
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gregory_Benford#The_Sunborn_(2005)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-benford/the-sunborn/they-had-a-legend

## More from this book

> “Quite patently artificial,” she said.
>
> “Looks like it to me, and I’m just a physicist.”
>
> “I thought you were an engineer-pilot.”
>
> “Hey, physicists can do anything.”
>
> “Um. So they think. But not biology…”

p. 137 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-benford/the-sunborn/quite-patently-artificial.md)

> Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man’s belt—big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change.

p. 163 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-benford/the-sunborn/definitions-her-grandmother.md)

> There was more known, but always more to be known.
>
> Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.

p. 212 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gregory-benford/the-sunborn/there-was-more.md)