It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.