Peter Watts

“You can be such a reptile sometimes,” she said.”

— Peter Watts

“You never finish a book. You only abandon it.”

— Peter Watts

“You give up a lot when you don't trust the EM spectrum.”

— Peter Watts

We are not thinking machines.

— Peter Watts

It’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.

— Peter Watts

“Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.”

— Peter Watts

“The vampires win every time.”

— Peter Watts

But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.

— Peter Watts

“The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death.”

— Peter Watts

Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes

— Peter Watts

“Szpindel’s eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillars.”

— Peter Watts

People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think.

— Peter Watts

“After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.”

— Peter Watts

“You can’t kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.”

— Peter Watts

“It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.”

— Peter Watts

“Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy.”

— Peter Watts

“The static’s nice. I could do without the screeching.” “Are you kidding? That’s the music of the spheres, commissar. It’s beautiful .…

— Peter Watts

“Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and…

— Peter Watts

“I think I’ll call you Cygnus,” Chelsea said. “The swan?” I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse. She…

— Peter Watts

“ Everyone’s got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.”

— Peter Watts

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the…

— Peter Watts

If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its…

— Peter Watts

“Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels…

— Peter Watts

“So there’s a membrane of—of living tissue around that star,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. “A, a…

— Peter Watts

“Brüks digested that. “Well, if it was supposed to be some kind of compliment, her delivery needs work. You’d think someone with…

— Peter Watts

“But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain…

— Peter Watts

“I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality…

— Peter Watts

“You know what happens when you keep a dog locked away from every living thing, except you visit once a day and…

— Peter Watts

“Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it…

— Peter Watts

“Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for…

— Peter Watts

“So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it's going to count. She's…

— Peter Watts

“Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough…

— Peter Watts

“IMAGINE YOU ARE Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one…

— Peter Watts

“Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical…

— Peter Watts

“We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are…

— Peter Watts

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the…

— Peter Watts

“I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if…

— Peter Watts

“Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness…

— Peter Watts

“A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable…

— Peter Watts

“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then…

— Peter Watts