An honest book is almost as good as a friend.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

One doesn't have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand.

I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.

Consciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.