"Though denigrated by some outside academia and research, she embraced knowledge for its own sake and what better way to honor that than reveling in the intricacies of the brain? If there were any answers to the human condition, if an immortal soul made its home anywhere, it was in its spongy gray folds."

"Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."

"A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs."

"I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher."

"You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite."

"This looks very much as if the integration of the day's experience into our memory, the forging of new neural links, is either an easier or a more urgent task. As the night wears on and this function is completed, the more affecting dreams, the more bizarrematerial, the fears and lusts and other powerful emotions of thedream material emerge."