“Nature was quick to pass the sponge of her deluges over these awkward sketches (dinosaurs), these first nightmares of Life.”

“The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the ideal made eternal prisoner”

“Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.”

“Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities.”

“Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?”

“And in any case...there are no more supernatural noises nowadays...”

“Thoughts and feelings change sometimes, as one crosses the frontiers.”