{"author":"Peter Watts","author_id":"Peter+Watts","total_quotes":47,"quotes":[{"text":"Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["child","instinctively","pack-animals","weaklings"],"id":13778,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"You should get more sleep,' he remarked. 'You won't need so many chemicals.'She raised an eyebrow. 'This from the man with half his bloodstream registered in the patent office.' Jovellanos hadn't had her shots yet. She didn't need them in her current position, but she was too good at her job to stay where she was much longer. Desjardins looked forward to the day when her righteous stance on the Sanctity of Free Will went head-to-head against the legal prerequisites for promotion. She'd probably take one look at the list of perks and the new salary, and cave.He had, anyway.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["career-development","free-will","nihilism","transhumanism"],"id":16299,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["cats","dogs"],"id":18532,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"The vampires win every time.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["vampires"],"id":36925,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["dehumanization","murder","property-damage"],"id":43432,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"Imagine you are Siri Keeton:You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.You'd scream if you had the breath.Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["cryostasis","science-fiction","space-travel","vampires"],"id":53284,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["machines","meat","questions"],"id":53729,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["analogy","reality","science","truth"],"id":60822,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's 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 couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["civil-liberties","humans","seligman","the-state"],"id":64489,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"},{"text":"Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.","author":"Peter Watts","tags":["act","strategy"],"id":79767,"author_id":"Peter+Watts"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":47,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}