Craig Swartzlander

“I think you’re all broken in some fundamental way, but you’re not all broken in the same place. And it’s the ways you each find to work around those breaks that make you who you are.”
― Gareth L. Powell, Fleet of Knives

“Half my age, and she’s probably already forgotten the difference between the meat she was born with and the chrome that came after.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“It hadn’t worked out that way. Even if we’d outgrown the need to stay quiet and hidden during the dark hours—the only predators left were those we’d brought back ourselves—the brain still needed time apart from the world outside. Experiences had to be catalogued and filed, midterm memories promoted to long-term ones, free radicals swept from their hiding places among the dendrites. We had only reduced the need for sleep, not eliminated it—and that incompressible residue of downtime seemed barely able to contain the dreams and phantoms left behind. They squirmed in my head like creatures in a draining tidal pool.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight