“More of your conversation would infect my brain.”

“Already, the brain consumed more than a quarter of the body's blood supply... an organ accounting for only a small percentage of body mass. If brains grew larger, and better, then perhaps they would consume more - perhaps so much that, like an infection, they would overrun their hosts and kill the bodies that transported them. Or perhaps, in their infinite cleverness, they would find a way to destroy themselves and each other. There were times when, as he [Stone] sat at State Department or Defense Department meetings, and looked around the table, he would see nothing more than a dozen gray, convoluted brains sitting on the table... Just brains, sitting around, trying to decide how to outwit other brains, at other conference tables.Idiotic.”

“Hank wants to have a conversation tonight. We had a conversation last night! I can’t have another conversation! He’l say shit that freaks me out because he’s, like, in my brain. We haven’t even known each other for two weeks! How can he be in my brain? It’s unreal ..”

“I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover – that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions”

“And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.”

“Conversion does not make us perfect, but it does catapult us into a total experience of discipleship that affects - and infects - every sphere of our living.”