Anomalies Quotes

“Why, that's a crock, Hermann. Look, you chaps have such a small population, so bloody few creative people. What do you expect? Anybody with energy and drive can make it in this world. And I come from a time that was dynamic, that really got off.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“We are starved for variety. The people, no matter how educated–anything tickles their nose they think is champagne.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting. ~ John Russell”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“But it was the beginning of a time of mercies. The crimes the Manson gang was to commit did not cost the lot of them their lives. California had briefly instituted an interval with no death penalty while the Manson cases wound through their lethargic system. The guilty then received lifelong support, living in comfortable surrounds and watching television and movies, labouring a bit, writing books about their crimes, giving interviews and finally passing away from various diseases. This era thought that a life of constrained ease was the worst punishment it could ethically impose.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“They would often lure victims with ploys appealing to the victims’ sense of sympathy.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Examining their homes, Warren saw that they followed a distinct set of rigid, self-made rules.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Some sources suggested that legends such as werewolves and vampires were inspired by medieval serial killers.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“All scientific work is, of course, based on some conscious or subconscious philosophical attitude.” ~ Werner Heisenberg”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Every game had its winners and losers, Roger thought. Gay guys had little interest in children, so they won big. With 11.6 billion souls in the world, what else could humanity do? Prison for unlicensed childbearing didn’t seem implausible to him at all.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Roger, I can’t see them taking away the one person, one child rule, though.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Now look, before you go shaking your heads, I know some of you back there think evolution is a tool of the devil, an idea Satan put into our heads. Or Darwin’s anyway. But listen now, please. We came out of a drought in Africa, ‘way back millions of years ago. No way to shake your heads at those fossils. Data is data. It’s a fact – we peeled off from the tree-swinging chimpanzees then. Dryness forced us down out of the trees to learn to hunt, and we got better at it. Better at talking, too, to coordinate hunting and finding food – so I’m told. We kept getting smarter. Not smart enough yet to avoid bloody messes like this one, but some of us are working on that, too. So why couldn't that happen to the crocs? They learn how to work together. Hunt together. And they remember back to who it was that drained their paradise, their Eden. And they knew who didn’t commit that huge crime. They knew the uniforms of the Iraqi Army. The Feydaheen, too. They knew we weren’t them. Okay, I’m just a grunt with a few bars on his shoulders. But I saw what I saw. Evolution never rests. What I hope is that we don’t blow this chance. The crocs are on our side – or vice versa, I guess. And Ol’Gator would have been proud of them for damn sure. We’re all alone on this planet, we smart chimpanzees. And things seem to be getting worse. Lots worse. I’m thinking, we could use another point of view.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“I did some thinking and found that biologist. He allowed as how the crocs have been under “selection pressure” ever since the Iraqis drained their swamps. Some migrated upriver. Some held on. But they had to find new ways of making a living and maybe, just maybe, that made them evolve faster.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“You know what they say about Iraq–dirty, hot, nasty, ugly–and that’s just the people.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“He kissed back, his eyes flickered, he grinned – but he didn’t look happy. He grasped the steering wheel and peered ahead into the starlit darkness. In the high desert you can see stars above the headlights. I knew him enough to see that he was thinking about something that could whisper across the galaxies with gravitation, not using obvious means like radio or lasers. “Any mind that thinks the Riemann numbers are a calling card – and can throw around stars…”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“No you didn’t.” Sam looked at me with a warm smile. “You’re the only one I could run to with this analysis – the rest of ‘em would laugh. You’re good, really good.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“At 11 PM you’re still working. Know your limits. The data can’t get better when you’re tired, y’know.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“And the first thing he’d thought was that his settled, comfortable life might get interrupted. He’d been afraid of getting sleep-slotted, afraid of the future– of losing his neighborhood, his friends, the skills he had. He had an old man’s habits of mind. Just holding on, out of fear. But thirty-eight years wasn’t so long. He could pick up the threads. Find old friends, make new ones. Learn a skill. Maybe even romance…with a new body. He’d have to stop jumping to conclusions about himself. Stop living inside the cramped horizons of an old man. Carlos sucked in a rich lungful of aromatic, humid air. He was here, now. And the future was all he–or anyone else–-had left.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“So there was a test. For Carlos it came every three years, and that’s what he was here for. You came in and, they poked you prodded, pried you open and ran a whole-body diagnostic. If your mental and physio indices were up to par, you got three more years of free service on Universal Medical. Like getting your driver’s license renewed. If you flunked... Even then, it didn’t necessarily mean death. Not unless you had already elected for that, of course. There was a hundred thousand kilobuck reward, passed on to whomever you stipulated. If you checked out, there were other rewards for your inheritors, family, even friends. Reasonable, really – the government had to encourage elective suicides, to keep costs down.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“You’ve heard of time paradoxes, yes? Space-time resolves those nicely. You can’t take back knowledge that alters the past. All that gets erased automatically, a kind of information cleansing. Very convenient physics.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Professor Wright had made no progress in answering Geoffrey's persistent questions. The Astronomer Royal was busying himself with a Royal Commission appointed to investigate the whole affair, though no one expected a Commission to actually produce an idea.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“In his wife’s severe frown he saw an eternal human impulse, to read meaning into the physical world – and a moral message as well.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“Let me put my philosophy clearly,” Wright said. “If the universe is an ongoing calculation, then computational theory proves that it cannot be perfect. No such system can be free of a bug or two, as the programmers put it.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“But look, nature doesn't know maths,” Geoffrey said adamantly. “No more than I do.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“The idea is, how do physical laws act themselves out?” Wright asked in his lecturer voice. “Of course, atoms do not know their own differential equations.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“symbol of the folly of worshiping mere signs instead of the essence.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“consensus-based decision making that took forever.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“He picks up the phone and calls his ex, but she has blocked his number. It has been two years since the divorce but he still harbors some dusty hope that it could all work out right after all. She told him months ago to move on. But to what?”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“To have such a vibrant universe, they had to dwell within it, not stand separate. “But you must see, there is a price. Creation ebbs. We cannot question the Law. We made it, because a finite yet unbounded system–this, our Creation–must have such Law to exist at all.” She said helpfully, “Otherwise, Creation does not generate interesting structures.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction

“She said helpfully, “Otherwise, Creation does not generate interesting structures.”
― Gregory Benford, Anomalies, a Collection of Short Fiction