Gregory Benford Quotes

I was sure I'd set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth - that I hadn't set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if 'The Big Trail' had been a success and launched me as a star.

You try not to pay too much attention to the hype before the game, because you never know what's going to happen.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

It bothered me that whatever was waiting wasn't waiting for me

Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true. When will you realize... Vienna waits for you.

The fundamental mistake I had always made - and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.

What you want, my lad, and what you're going to get are two very different things.

What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass?

You talk to people and they seem really nice and then you read what they write and it's very disillusioning. You have to deal with how people let you down in terms of that. Because I think I'm basically a nice person and I think I'm a real person, and a lot of people aren't.

What is fascinating about a place like Los Angeles airport is that it is lots and lots of people, many of whom have saved up all their lives and channeled all of their energies toward coming to the promised land of abundance and plenty - the American Dream. But as soon as they arrive here they get a crash course in the American reality.

When your mother is made out of your dreams, anything real is bound to disappoint you.

I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed.

Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.

A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.

We are never prepared for what we expect.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

It doesn't matter what you're chasing, when you get there you're gonna be like, "Oh, is this all? It kind of sucks."

Anticipation, I suppose, sometimes exceeds realization.

He who expects much will be often disappointed; yet disappointment seldom cures us of expectation, or has any other effect than that of producing a moral sentence or peevish exclamation.

We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world.

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.

In the real world there's an after-effect of disappointment if you lose an argument. But if, to begin with, you're set up not to have this particular autonomy, then you're not disappointed.

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

All of the thinking and planning that you do to get there, and then, in one minute, in one second, it just doesn't matter. It goes out the window. You either got it or you didn't. There is something kind of refreshing about that.

Experience finds few of the scenes that lively hope designs.