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“Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 31 (p. 360)
Context: You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life’s pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with — no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.

“Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 14 (p. 182, known as Benford's law of controversy)
Context: It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Passion

“Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go.”

Gregory Benford book In the Ocean of Night

The Snark, p. 195
In the Ocean of Night (1977)
Context: Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go. … You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you … windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…

Universe

““One of the laws of nature,” Gordon said, “is that half the people have got to be below average.”
”For a Gaussian distribution, yeah,” Cooper said. “Sad, though.””

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 17 (p. 234)

People , Sadness , Law , Nature

“Trouble comes looking for you if you’re a fool.”

Gregory Benford

To the Storming Gulf, p. 126 (Originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1985)
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Fools

“Life was growing and spreading here the way a disease propagates and eats and in the eating must kill. There should be something more, he thought. A kind of being might come into the universe that did not want to finally eat everything or to command all or to fill every niche and site with its own precious self. It would be a strange thing, with enough of the brute biology in it to have the quick, darting sense of survival. But it would also have to carry something of the machine in it, the passive and accepting quality of duty, of waiting, and of thought that went beyond the endless eating or the fear of dying. To such a thing the universe would not be a battleground but a theater, where eternal dramas were acted out and it was best to be in the audience. Perhaps evolution, which had been at the beginning a blind force that pushed against everything, could find a path to that shambling, curiously lasting state.”

Gregory Benford

Part 6 “Aleph Null”, Chapter 4 (p. 226)
Against Infinity (1983)

Life , Fear , Disease , Way

“Soldiers for equality, uh? Glad you warned me. I’d have thought you were just thieves.”

Gregory Benford

Part 4 “Hiruko: Six Years Later”, Chapter 1 (p. 148)
Against Infinity (1983)

““You know, my dear, you’re wrong that suffering ennobles people.” She’d stopped to massage her hip, wincing. “It simply makes one cross.””

Gregory Benford

Nooncoming, p. 100 (Originally published in Universe 8, edited by Terry Carr), 1978
In Alien Flesh (1986)

People , Suffering

“That thing doesn’t care about you. It won’t reward you when you take risks. It is simply indifferent. That’s the fact about it that most never learn. They hate it and fear it and finally ignore it. Because of that. It would be easier if it hated us. Maybe even if it hunted us. But it doesn’t care. Remember.”

Gregory Benford

Part 2 “Aleph”, Chapter 2 (p. 51)
Against Infinity (1983)

Hate , Fear , Learning , Indifference

“Talkers never acted when they could talk.”

Gregory Benford

Redeemer, p. 53 (Originally published in Analog, April 1979)
In Alien Flesh (1986)

“In its studies and learned colloquy, Faz saw and felt the tales of Men. They seemed curiously convoluted, revolving about Self. What mattered most to those who loved tales was how they concluded. Yet all Men knew how each ended. Their little dreams were rounded with a sleep.
So the point of a tale was not how it ended, but what it meant. The great inspiring epic rage of Man was to find that lesson, buried in a grave.”

Gregory Benford

Time’s Rub, pp. 260-261
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Love , Men , Dreams , Sleep

“Manuel stared at the place where Piet had been. The man he had known so little would now lie in this place far beyond the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome and the hammer of Marx, in a territory open and without plan, beyond man and his encasing theories, his filters, beyond the closed rooms of the civilized mind.”

Gregory Benford

Part 6 “Aleph Null”, Chapter 3 (p. 221)
Against Infinity (1983)

Lie

“He went to Los Angeles to do the work even though he hated the city; it was full of happy homogeneous people without structure or direction. While on the bus to work, it seemed to him Los Angeles went on long after it had already made its point.”

Gregory Benford

White Creatures, p. 170 (Originally published in New Dimensions 5, edited by Robert Silverberg), 1975
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Hate , People , Angels , Happiness

“(Crank theories) always violated the first rule of a scientific model: they were uncheckable.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 17 (p. 235)

“The role of boredom in human history is underrated.”

Gregory Benford

Doing Lennon, p. 266 (Originally published in Analog, April 1975)
In Alien Flesh (1986)

History

“No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 37 (p. 395)

“Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting.”

Gregory Benford

Doing Lennon, p. 268
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Pleasure , Age , Reading , Speed

“Disintegration of structure equals information loss.”

Gregory Benford book In the Ocean of Night

The Snark, a member of a machine-intelligence civilization, p. 195
In the Ocean of Night (1977)

Loss

“To shine is better than to reflect.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 16 (p. 220)

“As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in his first novel, Player Piano, some people love problem-solving and tinkering—and that is the final, irreducible driver of human history. Wars and faiths and leaders come and go, but the problem-solvers’ slow, steady work is the fulcrum upon which history turns.”

Gregory Benford

Afterword to Nooncoming, p. 104
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Love , War , People , Faith