First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.

Even light, which travels so fast it takes most races thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time to journey between the stars.

One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no 'them' out there. It’s just an awful lot of 'us.'

Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was really clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

How do you know you're having fun if there's no one watching you have it?

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.