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

— Peter Watts

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.

— Peter Watts

Imagine you are Siri Keaton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleo genetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistic. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

— Peter Watts

It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

— Peter Watts

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

— Peter Watts

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.

— Peter Watts

Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarcastic 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.

— Peter Watts

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels, but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

— Peter Watts

Nine days after Perrault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake. One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.

— Peter Watts

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

— Peter Watts