162 Quotes by Peter Watts

He’s smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he’s got a fifty-word vocabulary.” A soft snort. “It’s not like it’d kill him to use an adverb once in a while.

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.

Realist saboteurs do not, as a rule, enjoy long careers. Everyone gets caught eventually.

Brain’s got all kinds of gauges. You can know you’re blind even when you’re not; you can know you can see, even when you’re blind. And yeah, you can know you don’t exist even when you do. It’s a long list, commissar. Cotard’s, Anton’s, Damascus disease. Just for starters.

It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom.

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?

What’s the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.

We’re dead anyway, all we get to choose is the exit strategy.