“Writing The Breastplate was a labor of love and inspiration. Hopefully Ican get inspired for a sequel that readers are asking for. Shirley McCracken author of The Breastplate”

“but you can't spend your whole life hoping people will ask you the right questions. you must learn to love and answer the questions they already ask.”

“I learned that there are books and there are readers; given even the worst of circumstances, they get together. In the privacy of their own homes or on park benches or on public buses, in the corner of the reference room, at the end of an aisle of fiction, in the middle of the alphabet, they club up and conspire.”

“Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.”

“from the end of John Shirley's Black Glass, something like: "the Singularity guys don't understand, they aren't copying us, our brains, just the noise we make”

“No one has asked me a question yet, but I will not shut up.”

“truthfully, this is the fabric of all my fantasies: love shown not by a kiss or a wild look or a careful hand but by a willingness for research. i don’t dream of someone who understands me immediately, who seems to have known me my entire life, who says, i know me too. i want someone keen to learn my own strange organization, amazed at what’s revealed; someone who asks, and then what, and then what?”