“(At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adultHumans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to acertain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient,they're certainly psychopathic)”

“People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.”

“But only part of him was listening. Another part, even if it hadn't read Chomsky or Jung or Sheldrake—who had time for dead guys anyway?— at least had a basic understanding of what those guys had gone on about. Quantum nonlocality, quantum consciousness—Desjardins had seen too many cases of mass coincidence to dismiss the idea that nine billion human minds could be imperceptibly interconnected somehow. He’d never really thought about it much, but on some level he’d believed in the Collective Unconscious for years.He just hadn’t realized that the fucking thing had a death wish.”

“If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.”

“Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.”

“Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.”

“Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.”