It would be especially comforting to believe that I have the answer to the question, What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that-the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?

Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called “gender empathy”. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when you're gay.

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.

Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.

There are people who would love to spend their last ten years, or five years, or whatever it is, on the surface of Mars.

Yet if you don't understand the physiology of a biological system or process-like female sexual arousal-you can't possibly come up with a way to fix it when things go wrong. No one would have come up with a treatment for diabetes if physiologists hadn't figured out how metabolism, blood sugar, and insulin work.

Normally I object to strangers beaming force fields into my brain.