Blood Music Quotes

“Thought moves like a dissociation of leaves across a lawn in a breeze.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“They’re trying to understand what space is. That’s tough for them. They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is a range of taste intensities.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten. It was in the blood, the flesh. And now, it is forever.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Maybe that’s what your machine calls infection—all the new information in my blood. Chatter. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Didn’t anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment?”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Brilliant in the creation, slovenly in the consideration of consequences. Wasn’t that true of every creator? Didn’t anyone who changed things ultimately lead some people—perhaps many people—to death, grief, torment? The poor human Prometheuses who brought fire to their fellows. Nobel.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“She didn’t want to change just to be better. Though there was always better to aspire for. It was very confused.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“almost every living cell there was already a functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information. What was reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability?”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Can’t own a woman, Mike. Wonderful companions, can’t own them.” “I know.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“It is the bullet you don’t hear that gets you.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Louis Slotin, at Los Alamos in 1946.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Memory is stored in neurons—interactive memory, carried in charge and potential, then downloaded to chemical storage in cells, then downloaded to molecular level. Stored in introns of individual cells.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“I’ll go see what’s in the building,” she said. “Maybe it’s somebody like me, somebody smarter who knows about electricity. Tomorrow morning I’ll go see.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“They are Russians. You do not remember them in Berlin. I do. I was just a boy, but I remember them—strong, sentimental, cruel, crafty and stupid at once.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“You fucking hope we do,” John growled. “You first.” Jerry pointed. “Love you, too.” “Go!” They entered the tunnel.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Jesus, you’re morbid.” “It is, though, ain’t it?” “Yeah,” Jerry said. He grunted and stooped lower. “We’re behaving like idiots. Why this mound, and why now?” “You picked it out.” “And I don’t know why. Maybe no reason at all.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“If the universe agrees that past events are not contradicted by a theory, the theory becomes a template. The universe goes along with it. The better the theory fits the facts, the longer it lasts—if it lasts at all.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“We then break the universe down into territories—our particular territory, as human beings, beings thus far quite distinct. No extraterrestrial contact, you know. If there are other intelligent beings beyond the Earth, they would occupy yet other territories of theory.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Until now, the densest single unit of information processing on this planet was the human brain”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“The huge Bernard is encompassed within a tiny hundred-cell cluster.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Edward had inserted the plug into the wall socket. Now he picked up the lamp and upended it into the tub. He jumped away from the flash, the steam and the sparks.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Dr. Bernard, please.” “Dr. Bernard?” She looked puzzled. “We don’t have—” “Dr. Milligan?” Edward turned to see Bernard entering the automatic doors. “Thank you, Janet,” he said to the receptionist.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“War was not an option. Radios, trucks and automobiles, planes and missiles and bombs, were just not reliable. A few Middle Eastern countries carried on feuds, but without much enthusiasm.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“You’re good with your hands.” She touched his thumb where it rested on his knee. “You have very pretty hands.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“We have no proof introns don’t code for something.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“Fog obscured the distant towers of Manhattan, allowing only pale silhouettes of the World Trade Center to rise above gray and white opacity.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“He was thinking of politicians too greedy or blind to know what they were doing, white collar sharpies who had swindled the life’s savings from thousands of investors, mothers and fathers too stupid to know you shouldn’t beat your children to death. What happened to these people and to the millions of screw-ups, evil screw-ups, in human society? Were all truly equal, duplicated a million times, or did the noocytes exercise a little judgment? Did they quietly delete a few personalities, edit them out … or alter them? And if the noocytes took the liberty of altering the real screw-ups, perhaps fixing them or immobilizing them some way, going into their thought processes and using a kind of grand consensus of right thinking as a pattern for corrections Then who was to say they weren’t altering others, people with minor problems, people with all the complexes of little screw-ups and errors and temporary nastiness … things all humans have.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“You always knew what you wanted to be didn’t you? He asked Edward.

More or less.

Smart moves, a gynecologist. Never false moves. I was different, I had goals but no direction. Like a map without roads, just places to be.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“He held her hand and shook his head. "They're inside, part of us by now. They are us. Where can we escape?”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music

“He had performed this ritual before, getting into trouble and then coming to his mother, uneasy and uncertain, not sure precisely what sort of trouble he was in. With uncanny regularity, she had seemed to jump onto a higher plane of reasoning and identify his problems, laying them out for him so they became unavoidable. This was not a service that made him love her any more, but it did make her invaluable to him.”
― Greg Bear, Blood Music