It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?

Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.

[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.

And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

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.

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