Gregory Benford

Weeds sprouted in spaces where once-important people had proclaimed that their presumptions were imperishable.

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.

But then, growing up was not supposed to be easy. One Mom remarked offhandedly, “It’s the toughest work you’ll ever do.”

There was more known, but always more to be known.

Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.

The intellectual breeds of humans think in terms of abstractions. But most people have emotions and think they are having ideas.

“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?”

“Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said.

Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”

Nobody out here was going to find an alternative here to Earth’s tiresome clash of selfish individualisms and stifling collectivisms.

“You humans have emotions,” Seeker said slowly, “but more often emotions have you.”

Would an alien outsider judge America’s performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?

Great error, seen up close, can look like true greatness.

From birth it had integrated each experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale—indeed, this was the sole purpose of its conscious being.

An animal that liked abstractions? Maybe that wasn’t all that bad a definition of being human.