Quotes from Sheila Finch

Sentience without senses. Blind, deaf, nerveless, moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Presence without mind. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nirvana. (p. 517)

Inglis is full of metaphors about hands because they've been so important to our human development. It'll come in handy, we say. This child's a handful, and This is getting out of hand, or You're in good hands.

Sheila Finch was born and raised in London, England. She did graduate work in medieval literature and linguistics at Indiana University. Dragged to California in 1962 by her (then) husband, she fell in love with the state and has stayed there ever since. She taught fiction writing and the literature of science fiction for thirty years at El Camino College, in Torrance, California. She lives in Long Beach with a cat and a retired racing greyhound.

A sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable. And it made no difference if he believed or not. Either God is, or is not. When had it ever mattered if Humans believed?

Familiarity breeds wrong conclusions, the Guild taught.

A computer needs words to stay the same over long periods of time. A computer can't deal with a word that means one thing one year, another the next, or that slides from innocence into stupidity as silly did.

Language is a virus from outer space. WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Each species of intelligent life in the galaxy learned to limit its perceptions of the world it inhabited in order to preserve itself from insanity, then petrified those few chosen sensations into language. Once a child was brought up in a language system, it was impossible for her to hold a concept that couldn't be framed in that language.