“There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.”

“There is no such things as magic, though there is such a thing as knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature.”

“It seemed the more I knew about people the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.”

“In forming an estimate of sins, we are often imposed upon by imagining that the more hidden the less heinous they are.”

“I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants-silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.”

“The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.”