Timescape Quotes

“the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape

“The universe of artifacts was a human one.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“catch me with an unexpected result,”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“He knew that with the conflicted girls back east, it would've been different. Oral sex would have been an elaborate matter, requiring much prior negotiation and false starts and words that didn't fit but would have to do.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape

“Can you hold a thermometer in your mouth?” the bright brisk voice asked. “Or should we try the other end?” He squinted at her, loathing her.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“Sam Cooke,”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“To save money we stifled imagination and verve.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“I transmitted that astronomical part steadily for three hours.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“And I truly am sorry about Cronkite and your name getting into it and all that. Okay?”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“The problem with causal loops is that our notion of time doesn’t accept them. But think of that stuck switch again.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“There’s no conceivable coordinate system in physics from which we can measure time passing. So there isn’t any. Time is frozen, as far as the universe is concerned.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“Citizens for Decent Literature”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“How do you girls on the west coast get so smart so fast?” He leaned forward, as if questioning the California landscape outside. “Getting laid early helps a lot,”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“If the all-powerful observer measured a particle and found it at position x, then the particle had to be given a small push by the observer, in the very act of observing. That was Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. You could not tell precisely how much of a push the observer had given the wretched particle, so its future position was somewhat uncertain.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“The pages were dry and brittle, crackling as Renfrew turned them. From long exposure to the new methods of making books he had forgotten how a line of type could raise an impression on the other side of the page, as if the press of history was behind each word. The heavily leaded letters were broad and the ink a deep black. The ample margins, the precise celestial drawings, the heft of the volume in his hands, all seemed to speak of a time when the making of books was a signpost in an assumed march forward, a pressure on the future.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“Peterson remembered with a smile that the US Department of the Interior had made a thorough prediction of trends in 1937, and had missed atomic energy, computers, radar, antibiotics, and World War II. Yet they all kept on, with this simple-minded linear extrapolation that was, despite a bank of computers to refine the numbers, still merely a new way to be stupid in an expensive fashion.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“Without the giants mankind would be alone with the rats and the cockroaches. Worse, perhaps, he would be alone with himself. This fuzzy issue had not occupied the futurologists. They cluckclucked over butter mountains here versus starvation there, and supplied their own recipes. They loved their theories more than the world.”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape: A Novel

“On Friday there was a department Colloquium on plasma physics, given by Norman Rostoker. Gordon went and sat well in the back. Rostoker’s first slide was: Seven Phases of the Thermonuclear Fusion Program I Exultation II Confusion III Disenchantment IV Search for the Guilty V Punishment of the Innocent VI Distinction for the Uninvolved VII Burying the Bodies/Scattering the Ashes”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape