One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

If you DJ reality, that is, if you make a mash-up of actual reality, you're going to end up with something that inevitably people will say, "This is feminist." Because you cannot avoid that.

If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive.

The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Amazing how the heart clutches at anything familiar, whimpering Mine!Mine!

I wanted to forget the past, but it refused to forget me; it waited for sleep, then cornered me.