“The buzz about Google these days is that it's like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it's Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here's the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever they want.”

“The internet: always proving that you're not quite as special as you suspected.”

“It was a fungal party hellscape.”

“Its circumference was tiny, but he had a life, and he would not give it up.”

“A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we're penciling it in for a Friday morning.”

“I always thought the key to immortality would be, like, tiny robots fixing things in your brain,” she says. “Not books.”

“The nature of immortality is a mystery,' he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.' But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.”

“Now, for the first time in my life, I empathize 100 percent with Fluff McFly. My heart is beating at hamster-speed and I am throwing my eyes around the room, looking for some way out.”

“What if, you know—what if hanging out with Griffo Gerritszoon wasn’t always that great? What if he was weird and dreamy? What if the best part of him was the shapes he could make with metal? That part of him really is immortal. It’s as immortal as anything’s going to get.”

“When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted?”

“There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.”