p. 32 Do any of them have a thought in their heads, or are they all just bots, following a dialogue tree like some Elder Scrolls shopkeeper?
p. 37 One of the underappreciated pleasures of a long friendship is this constant tilling of familiar fields. Occasionally they turn over a new rock. But mostly they forbear and forgive each other's reputations.
p. 50 Who the hell would design a system like this, in which some teenage boy's digital goop could wiggle inside her and start coding up an entire other creature – a creature who'd grow to the size of a bowling ball while inside her?
p. 64 He's trim and handsome, and there's something sad about him. She approves of that. She doesn't trust happy people.
p. 106 Deb keeps her disapproval at a constant simmer. Their dearly departed mother was the same way. The Marks women, Dulin thinks, are emotional Crock-Pots.
p. 144 He's joking, of course. No one believes in bots. At least, no one JP knows or follows on media. The affiliation bubble that he's a part of – middle-left "reasonables," the NPR-listening, cabernet-drinking, mostly white folks who practice meatless Mondays – have agreed that the belief that some people (almost always people in other countries) are not conscious is not just solipsism, but a form of racism.
p. 157 It's like we've all become right-wing evangelicals longing for Armageddon. Even the worst problems are just part of God's plan. We've abandoned all sense of stewardship.
p. 200 Even though they live in a simulation, even though they are made up of ones and zeros, they are lucky, unbelievably so, to be these two arrangements of bits, in this particular moment.
p. 249 "There's only one problem if you find out you're inside a simulation. How to get the fuck out."
p. 250 If her poor, overworked brain could only get free of the body, it could finally get some work done, like a poet longing to be free of her family for an afternoon.
p. 266 "Rabbi. You lead a church." "Yes, well, I don't so much lead the synagogue as study the map and point out available routes."
p. 303 "Oh yeah. I drove up right away. And once the treatments started, I just sort of moved in. I was glad to do it. It was the first time in a long time I'd been useful. It was a terrible time, but..." He shakes his head. "This is embarrassing, but I was so grateful. Just happy to know what my job was. I haven't had that for a long time. Not since Marion was little."
p. 311 His pale feet, strapped into their Teva sandals, rest without effort on the wet floor of the raft. Such idiots, these appendages. He admires their ignorance.
p. 313 [After jumping into the calm, cold, canyon river water] JP can feel his blood whooshing around, worriedly trying to keep his organs at operational temperature.
p. 317 The sim undermined his certainty. An afterlife was now technologically possible, even plausible. He believed in backups; he believed in restoring from disk. Resurrection had become rational. There was no reason that the Simmers couldn't reinitialize him after his death.
p. 347 Both those things, and suffering was worse. Pain was just nerves firing, he said, the body firing off warning signals according to the rules of the simulation. Suffering was the awareness of that moment of pain – and the awareness that more of those moments were on the way. Suffering could occur even when you were feeling no physical pain. Suffering stretched into the past, all you pain remembered, and reached into the future to take in all the agony that lay ahead.
p. 381 [The nun, in older age] alternated between fury and acceptance and boredom and back to fury. The seasons came and went in her heart. But gradually, very gradually, a kind of climate change occurred. She was now warming but cooling down. She decided, at last, to become something different than the old Sister Janet. In her head, and in her heart, she would become a tree.
p. 383 "Oh, Zev," she says. He doesn't understand how precious he is to her. No clue to his worth, always chastising himself for being an indecisive man, a waffler, a thinker with no strong opinions of his own, and therefore no bedrock of faith. He mistook his openness for emptiness.
p. 433 The Engineer adjusts his glasses. "It's odd, isn't it? Putting a solid object in front of your eyes so you can see another world." "Like a book," the father says.
