“Jelly had no brain per se but was in essence all brain, a shared consciousness programmed for desire. He had an appetite for everything, voraciously absorbing the culture that surrounded him and becoming it, only louder. In other words, he was extremely teenaged.”

“Even torture that is only verbal reinforce the power of the torturer: The prisoner's imagination leads him to dread the next round of interrogations. And when it happens, the feeling of inferiority becomes more acute; it bores into the brain, and the cultural and psychological defenses that surround the brain disintegrate and vanish. The ego is dissolved.”

“He wrote to tell him not to be scared that he had injured his brain, because he had done the same thing and got better. It was a source of comfort beyond words.”

“These rare mini mind-blanks always seemed to occur when he needed perking up, creative jolts as if his brain had temporarily overclocked its processor to light-speed frequency, but with the side effect of shutting his consciousness down to protect it from overheating. That theory certainly fit the observable phenomena. Then again, the competing theories included: he was nuts; he had a brain tumour; aliens had temporarily abducted him.”

“He was surrounded and they were hungry for what few brain cells he had left. But you know what? He wasn't about to give in or give up. If he was going out, it would be the way he had come into this world.Fighting for every single breath.”

“His cynicism - a veteran's cynicism - was a thing that disturbed him all the time. It seemed to him after the war that the world was thoroughly altered. It was not even a thing you could explain to anybody, why it was that everything was folly. People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids. He had seen the insides of jaggedly ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous.”