John Tegner

“This feeling the attic does not belong to the house but exists in its own right, an anteroom of shadow and disorder as though the place were the house of memory itself, seeing before her the remnants of their younger selves, the self folded, packed into boxes, bagged and discarded, lost in the disarray of vanished and forgotten other selves, the dust laying itself down upon the years of their lives, the years of their lives slowly turning to dust, what will remain and how little can be known about who we were, in the closing of an eye we will all be gone.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“The camera meanders around various enormous rooms, presumably in different castles or palaces (we cannot be seeing one building; it is simply too vast). The walls are lined with statues and puddles of water crowd the floor. According to the people who believe such things, this is a record of one of Arne-Sayles’s other worlds, possibly the one described in his 2000 book, The Labyrinth. Other people have tried to establish the locations in order to prove that it is not a film of another world, but to date none of them has been conclusively identified. Notes in D’Agostino’s handwriting were found with The Castle, but these are in the same peculiar code as her last diary and remain impenetrable.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“He heard himself issue a chuckle, prefatory to some kind of speech act. The chuckle was reekingly phony, a creaking contraption of sinew and muscle, involuntarily activated by a craven wish to please and to fit in—to pass as an authentic person. It seemed to him that every word he’d ever uttered had been loathsome, slimy with self-interested calculation, his fatuousness audible to everyone and universally deplored.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

“Comprehensibility Theorem is the first mathematical theorem implying the impossibility of any AI agent or natural agent—including a not-necessarily infallible human agent—satisfying a rigorous and deductive interpretation of the self-comprehensibility challenge. … Self-comprehensibility in some form might be essential for a kind of self-reflection useful for self-improvement that might enable some agents to increase their success”. It is reasonable to conclude that a system which doesn’t comprehend itself would not be able to explain itself.”
― Roman V. Yampolskiy, AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable