Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.

The fact that the patients were complex human beings with a rich life beyond the hospital never really sank into the consciousness of the residents. Because they had no rich lives beyond the hospital, they assumed no one else did, either. In the end, what they lacked was not medical knowledge but ordinary life experience.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're being asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

People were so naive about plants, Ellie thought. They just chose plants for appearance, as they would choose a picture for the wall. It never occurred to them that plants were actually living things, busily performing all the living functions of respiration, ingestion, excretion, reproduction---and defense.

In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide.