1) "I do remember Helen telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust. Like you had a whole new personality, she said, and why not? There's a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday's krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain's a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that I'm a different person than the one who used to occupy this body."

2) "Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.
Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now?
Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials–but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean."

3) "This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams."

4) "'You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet.' He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. 'Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we've already given them Theseus' technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all.'
'We can cause those effects,' Sarasti said coolly. 'As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents.'
'Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it.'
'So what?' the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.
'There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field,' Sarasti pointed out. 'You can't see it. You can't see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others.'
Cunningham was nodding. 'That's my whole point. Rorschach could be—'
'Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves.'"