“At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.”

“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”

“You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.”

“All right. Are you going to come back? Do you want any soup?""No," said Jace."Do you think Hodge will want any soup?""No one wants any soup.""I want some soup," Simon said."No, you don't," said Jace. "You just want to sleep with Isabelle."Simon was appalled. "That is not true.""How flattering," Isabelle murmured into the soup, but she was smirking."Oh, yes it is," said Jace. "Go ahead and ask her—then she can turn you down and the rest of us can get on with our lives while you fester in miserable humiliation." He snapped his fingers. "Hurry up, mundie boy, we've got work to do.”

“If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror.”

“I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.”