Relic Quotes

“What we have here is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
― Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Relic

“It’s not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat?”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“But pattern-matching doesn't equal comprehension.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Everything in your dream means exactly what you think it means.”
― Sandra Ingerman, Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path of Direct Revelation

“I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.
I am the curtain.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

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

“(At least one theory suggests that while great apes and adult
Humans are sentient, young Human children are not. I admit to a
certain fondness for this conclusion; if childen aren't nonsentient,
they're certainly psychopathic)”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“You can’t kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots?”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Osiris became the type and symbol of resurrection among the Egyptians of all periods, because he was a god who had been originally a mortal and had risen from the dead.”
― E.A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead

“I have often found it true that the louder a person speaks, the less they have to say.”
― Douglas Preston, Reliquary

“The longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“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. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Now keep in mind, memories aren’t historical archives. They’re—improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that’s not to say your memories aren’t true, okay? They’re an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they’re not photographs. More like impressionist paintings. Okay?”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just … light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just … shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an … an illusion of continuity into your head.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

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

“Love and a sense of calmness are the only things you need to bring to the experience of death.”
― Sandra Ingerman, Awakening to the Spirit World: The Shamanic Path of Direct Revelation