Vinge Quotes & Sayings

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

So High,
So Low,
So Many Things to Know — Vernor Vinge

Peregrine Wickwrackrum was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there is good amid the carnage. — Vernor Vinge

I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. — Vernor Vinge

Funny how Underhill could get along with almost anyone, tuning down his manias to whatever the traffic would bear. — Vernor Vinge

So much technology, so little talent. — Vernor Vinge

Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality. — Vernor Vinge

Hexapodia as the key insight — Vernor Vinge

welts long enough for them to grow eyes. Nature does indeed prefer that cobblies be created right before the Dark. — Vernor Vinge

The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat. — Vernor Vinge

The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. — Vernor Vinge

I am only a cup that knowledge holds. It does not to knowledge matter how poor the cup is. It is the wisdom of those who drink of me that me wise makes. Fools make a sibyl foolish, wherever she is. — Joan D. Vinge

What we have is a data glut. — Vernor Vinge

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established. — Joan D. Vinge

Maybe everything we do is meaningless. But we have to try, don't we? We have to go on looking for justice ... and settling for revenge. — Joan D. Vinge

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect. — Joan D. Vinge

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write. — Joan D. 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. — Vernor Vinge

All his life he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge ... And now revenge was all that life had left for him. — Vernor Vinge

The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control. — Joan D. Vinge

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. — Vernor Vinge

How long must a fish study to understand human motivation? — Vernor Vinge

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. — Vernor Vinge

I say, let's learn more and then speculate. — Vernor Vinge

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change. — Vernor Vinge

Things change all the time; but how much of it is real? Does any choice any of us ever makes, no matter how important it seems, really cause a ripple in the greater scheme of things? — Joan D. Vinge

To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you'd ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need. — Joan D. Vinge

I love you,' he whispered again, wonderingly, as he understood at last how a lifetime together with someone that you loved could seem like an eternity, and yet not be long enough. — Joan D. Vinge

My gods or your gods, who know which are stronger?' That's why we honor them all - just in case. There are more cultures even than Gods in the Eight Worlds, and among them you'll find people who are willing to kill you, or each other, over any difference in belief or lifestyle or physical appearance you can imagine - and some you can't. They all think they're right. There's no Truth, Tammis, only differences of opinion. — Joan D. Vinge

And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large. — Joan D. Vinge

There's more to me, more to the universe, than I suspected. Room for all the dreams I ever had, and all the nightmares ... heroes in the gutters and in the mirror; saints in the frozen wasteland; fools and liars on the throne of wisdom, and hands reaching out in hunger that will never be filled. — Joan D. Vinge

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. — Vernor Vinge

Sometimes she talked like a poet; she made a little joke of it, so that you wouldn't mind. — Joan D. Vinge

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

I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. — Vernor Vinge

[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

Everything changes, today's tears are tomorrow's absurdities, after all. — Joan D. Vinge

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace. — Vernor Vinge

Learn to be - gentle with them. Learn that ... that gentleness isn't ... weakness. — Joan D. Vinge

He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft. — Vernor Vinge

Poor humans; they will all die.""Poor us; we will not. — Vernor Vinge

Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future. — Joan D. Vinge

The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as
long as all the time before — Vernor Vinge

He was guided by what he saw rather than by what he wanted to believe. — Vernor Vinge

But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. — Vernor Vinge

Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power." He — Joan D. Vinge

The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for. — Vernor Vinge

Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience. — Vernor Vinge

I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names - and then destroying us. — Vernor Vinge

For where there is heaven, there can also be hell. — Vernor Vinge

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

Real power is control. Knowing that you can do anything ... and not doing it only because you can. — Joan D. Vinge

Ty or Ra or Thect — Vernor Vinge

The heart of manipulation is to empathize without being touched. — Vernor Vinge

Though his invention worked superbly [ ... ] his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. — Vernor Vinge

The mers were also designed to reproduce only at long intervals, in order to maintain the natural balance of the environment in which they were placed. — Joan D. Vinge

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

This was a commercial situation, not some exercise in an Applied Theology course. — Vernor Vinge

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant. — Vernor Vinge

There's no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level. — Joan D. Vinge

IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is. — Vernor Vinge

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

Its agents -- not even
human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the ship's
automation — Vernor Vinge

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt. — Vernor Vinge

All [people] are intolerant ... Only they're intolerant of different things. — Joan D. Vinge

Now on Tines World, the Zone physics was still improving. What was it like thirty lightyears higher? Bili — Vernor Vinge

What I do not want to write is didactic political tracts. — Joan D. Vinge

Technical people don't make good slaves. Without their wholehearted cooperation, things fall apart. — Vernor Vinge

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it. — Joan D. Vinge

Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far. — Joan D. Vinge

Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear. — Joan D. Vinge

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning. — Joan D. Vinge

I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant. — Joan D. Vinge

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

Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots. — Vernor Vinge

We're long on high principles and short on simple human understanding. — Vernor Vinge

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. — Vernor Vinge

Hexapodia as the key insight ... I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs? — Vernor Vinge

Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program. — Vernor Vinge

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. — Vernor Vinge

Little fish risking everything for a piece of godhood ... and not knowing heaven from hell, even when they find it. — Vernor Vinge

As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.' — Stephen Hawking

These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion; or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual. — Joan D. Vinge

What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time. — Joan D. Vinge

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

As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones. — Joan D. Vinge

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. — Vernor Vinge

I have come to kill you."The death's heads shrugged. "You have come to try. — Vernor Vinge

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. — Vernor Vinge

This was the pretech experience, that even if you had no enemies the world itself could kill you. And — Vernor Vinge

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance ... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us. — Joan D. Vinge

If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn. — Vernor Vinge

He is afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her body so close to him he would never let her go. — Joan D. Vinge

Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle. — Joan D. Vinge

We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light. — Vernor Vinge

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight. — Joan D. Vinge

Politics may come and go, but Greed goes on forever. — Vernor Vinge

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. — Vernor Vinge

On this small world, there will be no more real darkness. But there will always be the Dark. Go out tonight, Lady Pedure. Look up. We are surrounded by the Dark and always will be. And just as our Dark ends with the passage of time in a New Sun, so the greater Dark ends at the shores of a million million stars. Think! If our sun's cycle was once less than a year, then even earlier our sun might have been middling bright all the time. I have students who are sure most of the stars are just like our sun, only much much younger, and many with worlds like ours. You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that Spiderkind can depend on? Pedure, there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever. — Vernor Vinge