Quotes from David Sosnowski

Perhaps people found talking to software less intimidating than talking to an actual person; maybe it was because a computer could ask them franker questions that would be deemed too invasive or rude coming from a human.

Lucy had started thinking about irony as a force in nature, invisible but inescapable, quietly shaping the arcs of human lives. It was like Occam's razor meets Murphy's Law: faced with two equally likely outcomes, the universe was biased toward the most ironic one.

It seems symbolic that I can't write my name anymore," she told Mr. Nosy.

What's silly is everybody trying to live longer," Gladys said. "They think they're adding years to their lives. What they don't realize is that all those years get added on the shit end.

I'm coding an artisanal consciousness.

In the end, it was a lot of nothing about nothing, thank God—or whoever it was capriciously doling out miracles while also creating the circumstances under which such were prayed for. Lucy wondered if maybe she should convert to Norse mythology or something, one of the ones with trickster gods, like Loki. The available evidence seemed to vindicate that kind of god, as opposed to the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving creator of space-time she'd been raised to believe in.

So you're saying that having kids is what it's all about and once you've had them you start waiting to die?

So you're saying that death is the kick in the pants our species needs to not turn into vegetables.

Google uses click-through statistics as a way to rank search results," George typed. "For people, memory search optimization is achieved by the emotional residue associated with the memories being searched. The strongest emotional associations cause those memories to rank highest.

That the dying mind would take us back to the time when we felt most alive.

Peekaboo teaches a baby to imagine the continuity of reality," George wrote. "And that's an important step toward achieving consciousness.

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as far as Buzz is concerned, the universe is two things: me and not me.

You never think about the things you don't think about, the things that are just there, part of the background, part of the routine.

Not that Marcus had any problems with Mexicans, seeing as they had a common enemy in the Orange One

The other things you don't think about are the opposite things, the things that aren't part of your background, that fall so far outside your personal experience that you don't give them a second thought.

Curiosity familiarized the cat with its surroundings so it wouldn't be surprised.

It's a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles—inside me and outside me—and the point where they overlap is where my experience of consciousness is located.

the third kind of thing we don't think about—the things the thinking of which just plain scares us. The things the thinking of which would change everything.

the Big Three had shut down their assembly lines to retool from subcompacts to behemoths with tanks measured not in gallons, but Gulf wars.

Paranoia—it seemed—could metastasize even easier than cancer.

George had filled up his head with all the necessary bits and pieces for resolving a problem—all the individual trees—but then hit the forest and was overwhelmed. Finally deciding to accept failure, he let his mind get distracted and . . . plop. There it was: the answer.

He'd discovered the devil's yellow cake in grade school during lunch. Everyone's mother but his had packed their little Americans off to school with these cellophane-wrapped loaves of gold. All Mo ever got was an apple he'd snap into with

an envious eye turned toward all those face holes stuffed with sun-colored cake.