Quotes from Peter Watts

If we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct? Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The game isn't over. The game is never over; and so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

Beowulf's Bane, an exotic glowing fungus that ate the flesh of elves, bore an uncanny resemblance to those of necrotizing fasciitis.

Ludzie naprawdÄ™ nie walczÄ… o odcieÅ" skóry czy ideologiÄ™ – to tylko wygodne wskazówki do identyfikacji "swoich". Wyszystko zawsze sprowadza siÄ™ do wiÄ™zów krwi i ograniczonych zasobów.

Nie jesteÅ›my myÅ›lÄ…cymi maszynami, jesteÅ›my czujÄ…cymi maszynami, które przypadkiem myÅ›lÄ….

wasn't just another piece of shit in the sewer to her: It was the one that clogged the pipe.

That's like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren't slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they're so damned clever.

never humanize your victims. It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae.

A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market.

fibrodysplasia

Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might have put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.)

In its own way, though, that nihilism itself can be comforting, and this is another place where I quibble. If it's all futile, we're excused from trying. And not trying is so much easier than trying-and-failing. It's soothing to have an excuse for hopelessness. And we do have a cultural bias toward believing that the most cynical response to any situation is the wisest and most knowledgable one.

entropy increases'? Everything falls apart eventually.

Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable.

We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.

Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked. "Vampires have folk tales?" He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

You're the first person I've seen here who's actually dressed like a monk." "It's a bathrobe.

LEADERS ARE VISIONARIES WITH A POORLY DEVELOPED SENSE OF FEAR AND NO CONCEPT OF THE ODDS AGAINST THEM. —ROBERT JARVIK

I could be the only sentient being in the universe. If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator.

when a lemur makes a human, it doesn't matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She's simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.

The GA's new recruits have to be the slowest learners since the eradication of Down's syndrome.

LEADERS ARE VISIONARIES WITH A POORLY DEVELOPED SENSE OF FEAR AND NO CONCEPT OF THE ODDS AGAINST THEM.

conspecifics

You'll just have to imagine