The Mountain In The Sea Quotes
"The whole place used to be a prison. The graveyards are filled with generations of dissidents tortured to death by one government after another."
"Without his mask and regulator, it wouldn’t have taken long to die."
"But leaving wasn’t enough—the feeling returned every time he thought of the ocean."
"But he couldn’t shake the feeling something had seen him."
"The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of."
"In this book, Dr. Ha Nguyen swims around with cephalopods and then asks a lot of questions. Unsure whether she is a neuroscientist or a philosopher, she ends up being neither."
"They drive a hard bargain. I remember Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan saying she couldn’t tell whether they were a nation-state, a religion, or a corporation—but that they certainly know how to operate like all three."
"The last six months have taught me this problem is beyond me. And frankly—though your book is astounding—I think this problem is also beyond you. But there is a chance it may not be beyond us."
"The island was nothing but a backdrop to her feelings."
"Voices of hawkers, the island of Hon Ba behind the swaying fishing boats—all of it meaningless in the face of her obsession."
"His perfect face, his eyes always turned away from her."
"He asked her to pass a plate of sweet basil leaves, calling her by the wrong name."
"Her attention on him had warped her memories, the way the gravity of a star will warp space-time around it."
"In the orphanage, personal isolation had been as total as personal space was nonexistent."
"Friendships were a method for exchanging another set of valuable trading commodities: bits of information."
"It was here that she had learned what it meant to be completely alone."
"Humans can be cheaper than robots. Sturdier, at sea. And more expendable."
"She remembered running up to him, one morning on the beach. Wet from the waves, feeling pretty in her swimsuit, trying to get him to see her."
"That person was alien to her. Worse than alien, because that sixteen-year-old self was her, but at the same time was not her."
"The world still contains miracles, despite everything that has been done to it."
"I find them eerie. Repulsive. I suppose it is the same for you when you look at a monkey. Unsettling."
"This was an extraordinary creature even before it achieved language, or tool-making."
"The most destructive gossip could be exchanged for almost any physical object. It always accrued value."
"There was no movement at the hotel. The sun was above the horizon, in a thin mist that silvered it and drained it of glare."
"This was what talking to Kamran did for her: allowed her to sort her thoughts, prepare for her interactions with others."
"Symbolic language is arbitrary, but not always. Sometimes, the iconic connection of at least some of them to something in the real world is visible."
"We got proof. Proof of the first true symbolic sign usage by an animal besides the human."
"What we are looking for is a symbol that has a root in reality."
"No matter how good you are, you can only be as good as the data you are given."
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be a Rustem?"
"The world doesn’t touch this kind of person."
"You can’t tell where your command ends and the response algorithm begins."
"It’s like an extension of the nervous system, but more than that."
"We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with."
"Evrim is round. Evrim passed the final Turing test."
"Nobody’s papers are in order in the Republic of Istanbul."
"It’s a revenge fantasy. We are not afraid it will happen: We hope it will."
"Evrim has passed the final Turing test: that’s when a machine believes it is conscious, because it asks a question of itself—and someone answers."
"What happens to a being that cannot forget? A being for whom what happened twenty years ago is as present as yesterday?"
"The entire time, humankind has been afraid of something appearing in another creature that we don’t understand ourselves."
"We are protecting that archipelago’s biodiversity."
"A utopia. A post-human world. What could be better?"
"The temet nosce error. I’ve sailed over the edge again."
"You construct a house, where you store things you want to remember. The associations of the memories with their locations in that house, your ‘memory palace,’ help you not to forget."
"Our memories, our actions, our memories of our actions. Nothing more than that."
"When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution."
"Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress."
"I distrust a scientist who has time for baking."
"If you invent artificial intelligences, and hand over to them many of the things we used to do ourselves, you also invent a group of people whose lives are dedicated to hacking into those new minds and bending them to their will."
"There was no look of contempt. And no look of pleading. There was nothing at all."
"My emotional state? Can she taste that as well?"
"WE ARE DYING. That is what I need you to understand."
"They trust me. I’ll talk to them, make sure they do a good job."
"What did the shadow of Hon Ba think when we left the archipelago? Did it notice? Does it miss us?"
"They should have resisted when the authorities came to take the dogs away."
"The indifference of the world—the indifference of the boy I loved to me, the indifference of the guards to the suffering of the people in the cages, the indifference of all of it, that made me crazy."
"I won't do it. I won't make a weapon from a work of art."
"I am alive. I have a right to defend my life."