Quotes by Peter Watts

Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.One of her boys, hearing this, said that hed heard it was the other way around.

The vampires win every time.

You said it was colorful. What changed?I dont know. Maybe nothing. I just— I dont actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more.So how do you know you still have them? Pag asked.Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. I know.How?I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered.I wake up smiling, I said.

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

Technology implies belligerence.

Like to hear a vampire folk tale? Sarasti asked.Vampires have folk tales?He took it for a yes. A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

I dont understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

Perhaps theyd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moments notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldnt fight something like that, you couldnt fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.Or maybe just accepting that thats what theyd always been.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

Maybe your empathys just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but youre only feeling yourself, maybe youre even worst than me. Or maybe were all just guessing.

Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.

The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmos fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

Transcendence is transformation.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.