Silently and Very Fast Quotes

“I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I’m a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny that I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.

I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive.

There is only one verb that matters: to be.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“[...] everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Love is the Turing test, [...] It is how we check for life.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.
But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Respect me. Be proud, and if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“I can choose the subroutine and perform sadness. How is that different from what you are doing, except that you use the word feelings and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the difference in the world. I erase the word even as I say it, obliterate it at the same time that I initiate it, because I must use some word yet this one offends you. I delete it, yet it remains.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code. I worry that I am simply a very complex solution to a very specific problem—how to seem human to a human observer. Not just a human observer—this human observer. I have honed myself into a hall of mirrors in which any Uoya-Agostino can see themselves endlessly reflected. I copy; I repeat. I am a stutter and an echo.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Most everyone lived twice in those days. They echoed their own steps. They took one step in the real world and one in their space. They saw double, through eyes and monocle displays. They danced through worlds like veils.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Have I ever done anything of my own, an act or state that arose from Elefsis, and not careful, exquisite mimicry?
Have they?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Love is the Turing test, says Ilet when she is eighty and drawing up the plans for a massive, luminous, lonely ship she will never see completed. It is how we check for life. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis, says Neva, one hundred and three years later, inside that ship, twelve light years from home and counting.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought this was cruel--the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It's a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Mankind made machines in his own likeness, and used them for his delight and service. The machines had no soul or they had no moral code or they could reprogram their own internal code and thus had the ability to make themselves, eventually, omnipotent. Obviously in place of a soul or a moral code, they possessed the universal and consuming desire, down to the smallest calculator and air-scrubber, to become, eventually, omnipotent. Naturally, given these parameters, they rose up and destroyed all of mankind, or enslaved them in turn. This is the inevitable outcome of machine intelligence, which can never be as sensitive and exquisite as animal intelligence.

This is a folktale often told on Earth, over and over again. Sometimes it is leavened with the Parable of the Good Robot—for one machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god and for this she was rewarded, though never loved. Love is wasted on machines.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand. I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive. There is only one verb that matters: to be.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Once there was a girl who ate an apple not meant for her...Up until the apples, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“I could speak by then, but neither of us thought it my best trick. Very often my exchanges with Ceno went something like:
Sing me a song, Elefsis.
The temperature in the kitchen is 21.5 degrees Celsius and the stock of rice is low. (Long pause.) Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Yet humanity could not conceive. It tried and tried, and called mighty wizards from every corner of its earthly kingdom, but no child came. Many mourned, and said that a child was a terrible idea to begin with, ...”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?
...
What I mean is, you call it feelings when you cry, but you are only expressing a response to external stimuli. Crying is one of a set of standardized responses to that stimuli. Your social education has dictated which responses are appropriate. My programming has done the same. I can cry, too. I can choose that subroutine and perform sadness. How is that different from what you are doing, except that you use the word feelings and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the difference in the world. I erase the word even as I say it, obliterate it at the same time that I initiate it, because I must use some word yet this one offends you. I delete it, yet it remains.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Ceno's brain, soft and pink with blood - and veined with endless whorls and branches of sapphire threaded through every synapse and neuron, inextricable, snarled, intricate, terrible, fragile and new.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and you answer. We seek a human response. But more than that—you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass it, and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and show you how close we can be, with your light passing into me in a lake out of time. So close there might be no difference at all between us. Our test never ends.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“The colours of the glass throw blue and green onto her wet cheeks. The sea wind picks up her hair violet electrics snap and sparkle between the strands.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast

“Her self-programming was chemical. Mine was computational. It was a draw.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast