Quotes from Peter Watts

A neuron didn't know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren't intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren't even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga. I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected.

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

It's really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful.

Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable.

Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.

You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke's liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one's looking.

After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient, they're certainly psychopathic)

You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?

Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.

The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars.

The longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping.

Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy.

Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.

If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.

Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.

They know God exists already that's old. I think now they're trying to figure what to do with It." "What to do with God." "Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.