100 Quotes by Vernor Vinge

You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simple can't feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering.

Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we'll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption.

One of his greatest talents was empathy; no sadist can aspire to perfection without that diagnostic ability.

It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.

Ravna became a librarian. "The ultimate dilettante!" Lynne had teased.

Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.

Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle.

Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.

Enormous cemeteries existed among sedentary civilizations, where the weight of the past grew larger than any present time.