EXTRACTS FROM THE BOOK
pg 17
The policeman told us to follow him down the corridor to another room…. He was an inspector. I could tell because he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He also had a very hairy nose. It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils.
pg 50 - On being an astronaut…....
I like really little spaces, so long as there is no one else in them with me. Sometimes when I want to be on my own I get into the airing cupboard outside the bathroom and slide in beside the boiler and pull the door closed behind me and sit there and think for hours and it makes me feel very calm.
pg 69
People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would builsd a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be verty different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than our planets. Or they might no have bodies at all.
pg 116
People think computers are different from people…. But the mind is just a complicated machine. When we look at things we think we’re just looking out of our eyes like we’re looking out of little windows and there’s a person inside our head, but we’re not. We’re looking at a screen inside our heads, like a computer screen.
pg 117
People are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can pictures of really big numbers, or they can have pictures of Chains of Reasoning when they’re trying to work something out.
pg 119
Also people think they’re not computers because they have feelings and computers don’t have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it a sad picture they cry.
pg 178
A thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new. I think there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.