Quotes from A Fire Upon the Deep

“I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Once upon a time I was such a good liar; I could talk the fish right into my mouths.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“[The Universe] does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood...and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“We're endangered by our own success.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a human
civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from every wall,
rebuilding what had been merely superhuman.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Where the surf meets the shore – lots of neat things can happen there.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“At the Docks’ altitude, gravity was still about three-quarters of a gee. Air fountains hung a breathable atmosphere over the middle part of the platform. The day before, she had taken a sailboat across the clear-bottomed sea. That was a strange experience indeed: planetary clouds below your keel, stars and indigo sky above.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as
long as all the time before”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“How long must a fish study to understand human motivation?”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience. Of”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Be cool, dear student. The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Pham Nuwen plunked himself down, stretching indolently.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Все наперебой заверяли друг друга, что бояться нечего.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Our conclusion: this Helper Symbiosis is just another messianic religion, another screwball empire excusing its excesses and attempting to trick those it cannot directly coerce. Don’t be fooled! Crypto:”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you. And”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such — and those living more peaceably around them — we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

“Its agents -- not even
human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's
automation”
― Vernor Vinge, quote from A Fire Upon the Deep

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Popular quotes

“We all desire to be understood, but no one enjoys being obvious.”
― Trevanian, quote from The Summer of Katya

“The univers is statistically more likely to be ironic than not,”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from First Meetings in Ender's Universe

“The larger the group, the more toxic, the more of your beauty as an individual you have to surrender for the sake of group thought. And when you suspend your individual beauty you also give up a lot of your humanity. You will do things in the name of a group that you would never do on your own. Injuring, hurting, killing, drinking are all part of it, because you've lost your identity, because you now owe your allegiance to this thing that's bigger than you are and that controls you.”
― George Carlin, quote from Last Words

“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.”
― Jack Gilbert, quote from The Great Fires

“This is life. We have to take it as it comes, because even though some things are really shitty, there's a lot of really great stuff too.”
― Rebecca Serle, quote from When You Were Mine

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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