“I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it's like some kind of brain surgery...”

“I wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, “Ow.”

“I am messaging you to say that I love you, and that you're completely wrong about me thinking you're stupid. I always thought you could teach me things. I was always waiting. You're not like the others. You say things that no one expects you to. You think you're stupid. You want to be stupid. But you're someone people could learn from.”

“Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.”

“Then it was this big thing. She was like, 'I never want to see you again', and I was like, 'Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.”

“We ain't anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes, and a story we tell about ourselves.' And what others say about us.”

“With a hologram, like when your teacher is one of them, if you aren’t looking right at them, they sometimes seem to be hollow. You see them and suddenly they don’t have a face that pokes out. Their faces poke in, their nose and so on, and there is nothing inside them. If you don’t look right at them, they can look just like an empty shell.”