Jon Courtenay Grimwood

"Inside every adult was a child, or so it is said. Professor Petra Mayer was different. Inside Petra Mayer was an impossibly beautiful, barefoot adolescent who wouldn’t have been seen dead giving her i…"

"The thought came and went, more wish than thought. Maria wasn’t good at considering her own emotions. Most of the time the girl found it hard to believe that what she felt might matter."

"There was no way she could know, but Prisoner Zero asked anyway because he was talking to himself; which was all anyone ever did, it seemed to him, talk to themselves while half meanings and misunders…"

"The fifty-third Chuang Tzu wore the very first on his cloak as a diamond buckle. Every emperor became a diamond eventually. It was one of the few advantages of living as a carbon-based life form."

"Gene Newman was Catholic, although not so Catholic that he had more than two children."

"Why would we do this? she asked, watching smoke trickle towards the ceiling. A whole world of rigid rules covering temperature, convection and Brownian motion all busily pretending to be truly chaotic…"

"Apparently this was a design flaw in the unaugmented human brain, a lagging of consciousness behind intent."

"The third nightfall was less impressive than the second, which mirrored a rule Tris had already identified; new emotions devalued, going from intense through familiar to reach a kind of ghost state wh…"