Anvil of Stars Quotes

“The fox speaks with the hurricane and says, “I need to travel far and fast. Can you take me?” The hurricane regards the puny fox with its huge, calm eye and asks, “What can you do for me?” “Why, I will let you whisper your dreams to me.” “But I must kill whatever I carry. You are a living thing and do not wish to die.” “If you do not kill me, I will listen to your inmost self, and tell all the animals, that they may feel sympathy for you.” “What do I care for sympathy? I am all-powerful.” “Yes, but someday, your winds will die, and my kits will tell this tale even when you are gone, of the time great-great-great-grandfather fox was carried by the winds and lived and learned their secrets.” “But then they will not be afraid of me, and what good am I if I do not inspire fear?” “Oh, no living thing could ever be so strong they would not fear you. I give you something more. I give you a voice throughout time that is more than a wordless bellow of rage.”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“Of all the illusions of childhood, the one he hated to lose most was this: that humans worked according to unspoken but noble goals, that they followed an intrinsic path to justice, that they would resist error and move toward self-understanding.”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“The Benefactors could not have known our character before you sent your ships into the Earth’s system…”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“There is no possibility that the Killers, if they still exist around Leviathan, have knowledge of humans,” the mom continued”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“What?” Rex cried indignantly. “I said it was self-defense, damn it!”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“Their math lacks integers!” “As far as we can tell,” Jennifer added. “They don’t use whole numbers at all. Only ’smears,’ they call them.”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“bosons—photons, and so on— are in some respects strongly tied to spacetime. Their wavelengths expand as the universe expands.”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“Baryons don’t expand when the universe expands.”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“About the anti em conversion process. I think they’ve worked out ways to access a particle’s bit structure, its self-information. To do that, they’d have to tamper with the so-called privileged channels.”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“he regarded the massive destruction of space war, the necessary total vanquishing of an enemy, as an essentially immoral act. Yet he desired justice for the Earth’s murder as much as any of the children”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“All intelligences responsible for or associated with the manufacture of self-replicating and destructive devices will be destroyed.”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“the children were no longer fast gods, but pigeons in the head of a very quiet, dark bomb,”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“the”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

“rendezvous with the robots after a fast”
― Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars