“He liked living simply. And he liked living alone. He had grown to dislike physical affection. It was intrusive, and it bullied his self esteem, because he wasn't good at it.”

“He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting.”

“When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.”

“He was someone who had to live alone, someone who found it difficult to be with others for any length of time, because he only had one mode - that discreet art of withdrawal which had, no doubt, taken him years to perfect. He had no other strategies for getting along with people and, though his colleagues probably saw this as the mark of a gentle, erudite, considerate soul, I was suddenly able to see right through it. Not because I was so very perceptive, but because I was so like him. He had been living in that one mode for so long, he had almost forgotten about it, but I was a near-beginner, and for me it was painfully obvious.”

“He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.”

“from the end of John Shirley's Black Glass, something like: "the Singularity guys don't understand, they aren't copying us, our brains, just the noise we make”

“He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.”