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As you are reading this novel, feel free to post your favorite quotes from the text here.

This isn't necessarily a favorite quote, but this seems an appropriate place to share. I love J.R.R. Tolkien's writing, and I'm currently participating in a long term readalong of his work with some others on Litsy. I love finding Tolkien references and allusions in other books as well, and this one has a few. One example is in the chapter "Pulse" at about 64% according to the ebook copy. I really appreciate these allusions as character descriptions.

"They are surrounded by ring after concentric ring of cops, media, and law-firm minions-collectively, what Tolkien would call Men-and a few non- or post-human creatures imbued with peculiar physiognomies and vaguely magical powers: Dwarves (steady, productive, surly) and Elves (brilliant in a more ethereal way). Randy, a Dwarf, has begun to realize that his grandfather may have been an Elf. Avi is a Man with a strong Elvish glow about him. Somewhere in the center of this whole thing, presumably is Gollum."

“Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.� - great summary of evolutionary biology :)

"The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. The structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air-sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulating them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan's speech."

"[H]is whole body has adjourned into some kind of metabolic recess, and his brain is not exactly purring at high RPM's either. He feels kind of the way he does, sometimes, the day before he comes down with a total-body cold-and-flu scenario, one of those crushing viral Tet offensives that, every few years, swats you out of the land of the fully living for a week or two. It is as if about three-quarters of his body's resources of nutrients and energy have been diverted to the task of manufacturing quintillions of viruses."

"Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers."