She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable. - Neal Stephenson

But Henry wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.