“So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. ...”

“Neel cuts in: "Where'd you grow up?""Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel ...”

“People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they'll believe you.”

“It was tall, made of pale blue light, a creature with long arms and long legs and the shadow of a smile, and above it all, eyes that shone bluer still than its body. "What do you seek in this place...”

“America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.”

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”