“But human beings are like that, she thought. We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.”

“Mari remembered what she had read in the young girl's eyes the moment she had come into the refectory: fear.Fear. Veronika might feel insecurity, shyness, shame, constraint, but why fear? That was only justifiable when confronted by a real threat: ferocious animals, armed attackers, earthquakes, but not a group of people gathered together in a refectory.But human beings are like that,' she thought. 'We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.”

“I don't think. I react. My action is divorced from all emotion and logic. It isn't human or inhuman-it just is. I believe that choices like these, made in absolute crisis, come from our True Selves, bypassing all experience and thought. These kinds of choices are the closest thing to fate that human beings will ever experience.”

“Love is the grounding of our existence as humans and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings.”

“Angels are thoughts of God--to pray to an angel is to look to a level of pure thinking, divine thinking, and to ask that it replace our thoughts of fear. (Page 27.)”

“We then return our gaze to the mirror-boxed future-towns circling us-the hard drives of our culture, where the human tribe is making flesh its deepest needs and fears; teaching machines to think; accelerating the pace of obsolescence; designing new animals to replace the animals we've erased; value adding; reconstructing the future.”