Children of Memory (Children of Time, #3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

She’s learning that getting a proper education doesn’t answer questions, it just teaches you to ask them.

Things fall apart, though, and entropy is the landlord whose rent always gets paid.

We seek for every possibility of life and sentience, because the universe is vast and cold and mostly empty, and variance from that void is to be treasured.

Sometimes the friends you met along the road were within you all along.

A flying object, unidentifiable. What would they think?

She’s living in the shadow of a greater version of herself that is, itself, only a copy of a copy of a copy of something some ants were thinking about way back when. Miranda supposes you have to get philosophical eventually. “It’s a lot to take in,” she admits.

“The essential fallacy,” Gothi picks up, “is that humans and other biologically evolved, calculating engines feel themselves to be sentient, when sufficient investigation suggests this is not so. And that sentience, as imagined by the self-proclaimed sentient, is an illusion manufactured by a sufficiently complex series of neural interactions. A simulation, if you will.”

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

Knowledge and understanding is the crown atop the hierarchy of needs, the thing you can’t have enough of.

As though she once stepped through a magic doorway long ago, when she was a child, and has spent a lifetime trying to return to that place.

Nice allusion to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe