Quotes from Peter Watts

I love other creatures almost as much as I hate people

Electrophoresis.

Don't lecture me in my own field! We've got language and speech centers hardwired into our brains. That gives us a common starting point. Gels don't have anything like that. Speech might just be one giant conditioned reflex to them.

Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind.

Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.

Everything's an act. Everything's strategy.

The math was irrefutable: The one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think.

how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean." "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the twentieth century.

Half my age, and she's probably already forgotten the difference between the meat she was born with and the chrome that came after.

Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I

Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even real people do that, don't they?

I don't know what parts of me the Ceph have blown away and I don't know how much else has been broken down to keep the rest of me going, but I know that at least my balls are still intact. I know this because I can feel them crawling back up into my abdomen.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half asses way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on try. We focus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back

Yeah, but sociopaths don't blend in well." "Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you." Sascha whistled. "Wow. Perfect play-actor." "Or not so perfect. Sound like anyone we know?

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

The water's too deep to stand in now— ...feebly treading water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It's a pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds, brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.

They're not post-Human. Not yet." "How can you tell?" It was only half a joke. "Because otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk to them at all.

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You

The moved and the shaken.

YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU MAD. —Aldous Huxley

Have a drink," he said. "Helps the future go down easier.

And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all.

By now it's got as much in common with its origins as a humpback whale would have with the sperm cells from a therapsid lizard. Still