Astronomers From The United States

"To us, most human morality is carefully thought-through self-congratulation."

"Nature’s nature was change. It was not a museum."

"“So many people, close-packed.” “Your kind apparently enjoys the crowding.” “I…I can sort of see why it might be exciting. Like a never-ending party.” Speaker grimaced. “Just the sort of horror I imagined, yes.”"

"Weeds sprouted in spaces where once-important people had proclaimed that their presumptions were imperishable."

"Evolution was still at work, pruning the failures from the gene pool with unblinking patience."

"Great error, seen up close, can look like true greatness."

"Propaganda of sufficient age became art."

"While a gigantic amount has been written or spoken, culture in the end is the fraction that gets remembered."

"Curious, how any tool properly made acquires a beauty."

"Uncompromising zeal doesn’t look in the mirror much."

"Seeker laughed. “You are so—well, human. You always think you are the ultimate.” “And…we’re not.” Seeker inspected the ceiling. “It seems unlikely.”"

"The intellectual breeds of humans think in terms of abstractions. But most people have emotions and think they are having ideas."

"Individual recollections of the past are easily shaped by others. After a while they need have little bearing on the once-lived events."

"Nothing is eternal—including prisons."

"“How can you shrug off history?”… “By studied neglect.”"

"In any case, caution outweighed theory, as mice knew about elephants."

"You need friends to keep you on your feet, and enemies to keep you on your toes."

"Good food was like sex, one of life’s blessings, but they both lost their edge when talked about too much."

"History held counterexamples to any facile rule."

"They all lived as ants in the shadow of mountains of millennia, and time’s sheer mass shaded every word."

"“You humans have emotions,” Seeker said slowly, “but more often emotions have you.”"

"For her it was a slippery descent into a labyrinth where twin urges fought, revenge versus survival. These two instincts, already ancient before the first hominid walked, rarely married with any security. Yet if she did not feel the pinch of their competition, she would not be, by her own judgment, a true human."

"From birth it had integrated each experience with its innate sense of balance and appropriate scale—indeed, this was the sole purpose of its conscious being."

"In his view, the true deep human fantasy was the conviction of safety. Men believed their women were devoted; wives felt that their men were dependable. Both ignored contrary evidence."

"Naturals felt best in groups of a hundred or so, and better if only a few dozen were involved. Hunting parties had been about that size, for the long-extinct big game. Many important institutions were of the same rough scale: the ancient village, governing councils of nations, commanding elites of vast armies, teams playing games, orchestras, family fests. All human enterprises that worked were of that size, and nearly everything that failed was not."

"But then, growing up was not supposed to be easy. One Mom remarked offhandedly, “It’s the toughest work you’ll ever do.”"

"The evolutionary routes are many, she knew, wending through the howling wilderness of the maladaptive, on to their severely narrowed destinations. Biology abounded with convergent examples, destinations arrived at along very different paths. Fruiting bodies of slime molds and myxobacteria alike evolved multicelled advances. Warmbloodedness came forth several times, as did live birth and even penile tumescence. The eyes did indeed have it—as seen in the camera-like eyes of vertebrates and octopi, and the similar tiny preceptors of worms and jellyfish. Nature invented over and over again the mechanisms used by diverse organisms to hear, smell, echolocate, sense the prickle of electric and magnetic fields."

"None of the above. That’s often the right answer, and bugger the exams."

"Better be a bit more diplomatic. Translation: cover your scientific ass."

"“Why paired?” Viktor asked. “Have two sexes?” “Hard to imagine how electromagnetic creatures could,” Mary Kay said. Viktor grinned. “Lack of imagination is not an argument. Especially lately.”"

"They had a legend about a Chemical pinned to a piece of dead matter and allowed to die that way—Diminished to extinction! Apparently a commonplace among Chemicals. Yet after this fearsome loss, the identity emerged from its full subtraction—to claim life again. Such a desperate story! Elementary knowledge tells us that such things do not happen, of course."

"Thing about crazies is, they’re crazy. You can’t even understand them in retrospect."

"That mood had persisted when she finally got home and, unable to sleep, watched some TV. It was as usual, a cacophony, which combined with the other audio media gave a disposable pop culture that made every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, dead."

"As a political commentator of the time put it, most real-world people she knew thought of Washington, D.C., as a whorehouse where every four years ordinary folk got to elect a new piano player."

"The barely awake public, trained to the attention span of a commercial, thought that science had two children: either consumer yummies, served up by the handmaiden of technology, or else awesome wonders like the beauties of astronomy. The unsettling side they largely ignored, unless for the momentary shock value of, say, swollen insects doing disgusting things. But the root promise of science was of a world unshaped by humans. The expanses of time and space that stretched out from the human community were terrifying, and most avoided even thinking of them."

"But these were mere passing irritants. Deeper were the systemic troubles. She stressed the many unknowns; the media wanted sharp answers to huge questions, preferably in a compact one-liner. She tried to emphasize the progressive questioning of her method and how all answers were provisional, awaiting confirmation; reporters liked zippy adventure and exciting guesses with, of course, striking visuals in primary colors."

"Prolonged exposure to journalists made her distrust any news report; they got matters wrong so casually, even the simple ones."

"Inside, the place had enough bare concrete and ribbed ducts and stark lighting to be a surrealist theme bar. Very hip but still just another joint where luncheon was lunch for six bucks extra."

"Outside the Sea Lounge were ranks of motorcycles, mostly Harleys. Through the open windows she could see a jammed crowd raising beer glasses to the monotonous thump of the live band. Being Harley guys, they were of course rebels, rugged lone wolves, individual spirits, as was obvious because they were all wearing the same jackets and jeans, bandannas and sunglasses, big brass belt buckles and tattoos, probably even the same underwear."

"Orange County, with its signature long lines of tall palm trees, was working toward being “max-frilled,” as the slang had it, but at least it didn’t have the touches of L.A. The post office didn’t offer valet parking yet. On rainy days parking tickets weren’t slipped inside protective envelopes, as in Beverly Hills. There were no water bars, with fifty chilled varieties at two bucks a glass, with no ice because it would erase the regional subtleties. And when you called the police department and got put on hold, no classical music played."

"Her eyes flipped down through the usual scandal, gossip, and politics, noting that there didn’t seem to be much difference between them anymore."

"Ours is not to reason why, ours is to measure and report—the experimenter’s credo."

"Indeed, she had tried to follow books and films about science, but they featured rugged, style-conscious folk who transacted their work in ornate bars, atmospheric dens thickly mired in a high-contrast noir underworld future where bizarre ornamentation passed for any sense of newness. She had never known anybody who could design an experiment or do a calculation on table napkins, sipping hip drinks while guitar riffs wailed in the smoky background, but in movies and TV this was standard, apparently to make matters more interesting to a weary public with the attention span of a commercial. Scientists were either aggressively hip, often clad in tight leather, or else pitiful, hopeless nerds, obsessional neurotics nobody would trust for a moment with the discoveries they had, quite implausibly, ushered into the world while anxiously trying to get laid."

"Information wants to be free—remember that old saw? Some truth to it, only it’s backwards. This isn’t an information economy—we’re drowning in that—it’s an attention economy. That’s what everybody’s vying for."

"She had changed her name from the African Aleix to Alicia when she went away to college, fresh beginnings and all. Her parents had been into black roots and the rest of it when she was born, then had rapidly backed away. Her father’s political evolution had followed a trajectory away from what he termed in one of his op-ed pieces “the narcissism of minor differences.” He had approved her abandoning the Africa-nodding of Aleix, remarking only that his thinking in those days had been mere mulling over food and folktales. She had been surprised when he wrote a series of columns on his emergence, his recovery from her mother’s death in an auto accident, and one entirely about her. This was on his long march abandoning, in his phrase, “obligatory blackitude,” so he had folded it into a thesis about the hollowness of hauling out costumes and traditional foods from lands you had never even visited. He had taken a stand against a black group insisting on carrying their “cultural weapons” to political rallies, on grounds that they stood for a precious cultural inheritance which should be beyond criticism. Tom Butterworth (“Uncle Tom” to his enemies, of course) then argued that a ban on spears was scarcely an attack on their culture, since none of them knew much more about real spears than which was the business end."

"She sighed. “We’re just guessing.” “When you have a Ph. D., you call them hypotheses, not guesses.”"

"To believe anything so far-fetched, I’d have to see a solid calculation."

"The ship of theory could set sail on tides of mathematical grandeur and hope alone, but only data could fill its sails."

"She was grateful for something more than smooth, meaningless phrases. Better, the man had not reverted to the hedged-in, minimize-possible-damage style. And the first of all the commandments shall be: Cover Thy Ass."

"I like Orange County, though. It’s like L.A. without caffeine."