Cryptid

“Daniel understood the complaint. For Daniel, too, had once designed a building, and savored the thrill of seeing it built, only to endure the long indignity of watching the owner clutter it up with knick-knacks and furniture.”
― Neal Stephenson, The System of the World

“The best teachers impart knowledge through sleight of hand, like a magician.”
― Kate Betts, My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine

“Why’s a sticky word, though. It’s not especially productive to think of them as agents with agendas. Better to think of them as—as very complex interacting systems, just doing what systems do. Whatever the reagents tell themselves to explain their role in the reaction, it’s not likely to have much to do with the actual chemistry.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn't diminish the point of exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia