You have never seen the world, only a screen behind your eyes. Underneath it is a room that hands back everything you put into it, in its own time, with no one adding mercy.

Once I had a way of checking a claim before I leaned on it, the natural question came next. What was actually there?

Irrationality is not stupidity. It is signing for whatever your mind hands you without opening the package, and some of the cleverest people I have met never open it.

Feeling sure proves nothing. A belief you were told a hundred times feels exactly like one you tested, and most people only learn which was which when the floor gives way.

Your eyes are not a window. Your brain is an editor, built to spot tigers, not truth. And the tiger now is a bad idea it has not learned to see.

Most wars between "our God" and "their God" are not about God. They are about people claiming a truth they have never learned to check, and refusing to admit it.

Before anything else, before the world and before the question of how to live in it, I had to know what I could trust.

You think you are choosing, but mostly you are running on instructions you never wrote. I spent most of two decades mistaking a shelf of other people's thoughts for a mind, and this book is how I walked out.

The trouble with the answers you were given about God, death and how to live is not that they are wrong. It is that they were never yours.

Most of your thoughts are not yours. They were installed before you could refuse them, and this book is one man's record of pulling them out and taking back the controls of his own life.

Eleven crossings in twenty-two days, all outside rostered hours. Eleven days before the first, the same Handler argued for a child and lost. The correlation reaches Dev Sharma’s desk with his morning tea.