“I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.”

“We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.”

“What do we see by [our enlightened age] which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing? We see a hundred men hanged, where they saw one. We see five hundred transported, where they saw one. We see five thousand in the workhouse, where they saw one. . . . We see children perishing in manufactories, where they saw them flourishing in the fields. We see prisons, where they saw castles. We see masters, where they saw representatives. In short, they saw true men, where we see false knaves. They saw Milton, and we see Mr. Sackbut.”

“Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb.You should look under the bed.”

“You keep me here. You can't live in a world where you don't know where and what I am doing. We inside each others souls.”

“Ryan and Jethá propose that our ancestors, at least from 200,000 years ago, were living in a world of plenty where the resources of food and sex were in abundance but were choosing to stay hungry. After a couple of hundred thousand years of this ‘Eden’ we apparently forgot who we were, got our appetites back, and before we knew it we were drowning under babies we no longer chose to dispose of at birth.”