“Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-buildi...”

“I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery eno...”

“You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?”

“The neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness.”

“Its kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.”

“Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.”

“People are more difficult to work with than machines. And when you break a person, he can't be fixed.”

“The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.”

“The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”

“How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Faler...”

“This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.In Aerograd, the word for meat and memory are the same.”

“Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low l...”

“Not everything needs to be said. The silences, the words that arent spoken, lead us to the questions we should be asking.”

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.”

“Why do I always have so many fucking questions in my head?”