17 Quotes by Raphael Carter

...you can't just break through a person's defenses like that; the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.

...if you can achieve total intimacy with a piece of cable that costs fifty-nine kopeks, what good is it? How can you say you have something special with a person, when you can get the same thing with anyone in Russia in fifteen minutes?

...you think cabling is unnatural--that's what your arguments all come down to. But it's not. Not between people that really fit. Maya, do you have any idea how unlikely it is that two structures as complex as minds could be joined like that? It's like picking up two stones at random and discovering that they fit together perfectly. It isn't a coincidence, it can't be. They fit together so easily--like reuniting something that should never have been broken, filling in some ancient wound...

...it changes the central fact of the human condition: that each of us lives behind one set of eyes, and not another; that our own pain is an agony, and another's pain only an abstraction we believe in by an act of faith. It makes impossible all the sins of locality, all the errors that arise from being prisoned in one body and no other--as racism, sexism, classism, and of course and especially nationalism.

Those who wake... do not regret the dream.

The mind has doors... even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.

I pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you’d find living under a rock. Vermin.

You think we have a connection because of all the things you’ve sucked out of my mind by screening, but that isn’t real. Trust comes when you’ve worked with someone for years; it doesn’t speed up just because you can think fast, and it doesn’t materialize when you stick a cable in someone’s head. What you get from screening me isn’t friendship, it’s data. We’re strangers.