by Robin Sloan
Picador, New York 2013
- It’s very quiet. I set my chin in my palm and count my friends and wonder what else is hiding in plain sight.
- The relationship between book and reader is private.
- So uncool it’s cool again.
- If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.
- We probably just imagine things based on what we already know and we run out of analogies in the 31st- century.
- Fingers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for ideas, finding nothing.
- Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader.
- These guys don’t just fly under the radar; they’re subterranean.
- Nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment – maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.
- What’s our greatest question? … How do you live forever?
- Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines – it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.
- People believe weirder things than this.
- Every day you learn something amazing… and you realize there’s so much more that’s waiting. Eighty years isn’t enough. Or a hundred. Whatever. It’s just not.
- Magic is not the only power in this world.
- It feels like no time because you’re thinking so hard… There’s so much information to absorb and it comes so fast.
- I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.
- Sometimes discipline is the truest form of kindness.
- Getting stolen is one of the best things that can happen to an object. Stolen stuff recirculates. Stays out of the ground.
- How would you find a needle in a haystack? “I would ask the hays to find it.”
- The whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.
- I did not expect to know the truth in my lifetime. It is a gift beyond measure.
- There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.
- All the secrets in the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.
- Your life must be an open city, with all sorts of ways to wander in.
- The book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind.
- I am speaking of the willingness to entertain absurd ideas. It is a habit that is highly prized.
- The measure of a bookstore is not its receipts, but its friends.
- It’s not over until you hold the book’s ashes in your hands, weeping at the years you’ve lost.