Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling . . . as if she were a person in a book. - Rudy Rucker

My real speciality is the mathematical analysis of Hilbert Space operators. But this was no time to come on like an ivory-tower idealist.

Will molecular manufacture give all of us the luxuries we want? No. Skewed inverse power-law distribution of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. That is, roughly speaking, if there are a thousand people at the bottom of the heap, and a hundred immediately above them, there will only be ten farther up, and just one perched on the top in possession of a large proportion of the goodies. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there's going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel as though we're getting screwed.

I'm not a brave man. My self-image is of a very small and weak person. In point of fact, I'm almost six feet, and solidly built. But I was a late bloomer. I spent those formative early high-school years as a pudgy little science whimp. I'm still scared of big men with deep voices.