Gregory Benford Quotes

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

Jerry reversed the usual formula of the superhero who goes to another planet. He put the superhero in ordinary, familiar surroundings, instead of the other way around, as was done in most science fiction. That was the first time I can recall that it had ever been done.

Everyone loves to fly, and flying underwater is even better than flying in air because there are things around you.

The Nautilus was piercing the water with its sharp spur, after having accomplished nearly ten thousand leagues in three months and a half, a distance greater than the great circle of the earth. Where were we going now, and what was reserved for the future?

I feel SF is going through an experimental phase right now.

If you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen, and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen, get in a sub. You climb in, seal the hatch, turn on a little oxygen, turn on the scrubber, which removes the CO2 in the air you breathe, and they chuck you overboard. Down you go.

The ocean is this beautiful, unexplored place. Why on Earth everyone isn't down there, I don't know.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

One of the sports I do - my wife thinks I'm nuts - is open-water spear fishing, what we call blue-water hunting. We get in a boat, and we go offshore, normally about 30 miles. So when you jump off the boat, there are no reefs, and the bottom is no longer fifty or a hundred feet: it's thousands of feet. It's sort of like being in outer space.

The deep sea is the largest museum on earth, it contains more history than all the museums on land combined, and yet we're only now penetrating it.

I want to be a scientist who studies the ocean when I grow up. I would go out to sea, and scuba dive, and find new things, and National Geographic will hire me.” Sure, Nudge. Probably around the time I become president.

To the pilot of a deep sea submersible, upon finding out what would happen if the craft sprung a leak while submerged. I'll trust you to make sure that doesn't happen.

The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.

The DEEP SEA has more history in it than all the museums of the world-combined.

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.

Action and adventure on land and sea-you can't ask for more. But Robert Kurson raises the ante in Pirate Hunters with an array of mystery and a fleet of colorful characters spanning four centuries. This is a great summer read!

I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

Of all nature's animated kingdoms, fish are the most unchristian, inhospitable, heartless, and cold-blooded of creatures.

Why does pouring Oil on the Sea make it Clear and Calm? Is it that the winds, slipping the smooth oil, have no force, nor cause any waves?

According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.

Science fiction is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.

Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.

We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.

You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone.