"As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts."

"The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation."

"Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real."

"Rapture is costly, it usually means you are overlooking consequences."

"When people turn other people into selfobjects, they are trying to turn a person into a kind of spare part."

"There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete."

"The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, 'We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case."

"This is a new nonnegotiable: to feel safe, you have to be connected."

"Face-to-face with a computer, people reflected on who they were in the mirror of the machine."

"You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true."

"Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available."

"Overstimulated, we seek out constrained worlds."

"Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?"

"In games, he feels that he is 'creating something new.' But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide."

"The idea of the original had no place."

"It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy."

"Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?"

"Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body - not too little, not too much, just right."

"Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice."

"Technophillia is our natural state: we love our object and follow where they lead."

"Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves."

"There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things-her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation-I think of it as 'whole person conversation'-if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness."

"My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me."

"If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, 'I changed my mind."

"I miss those days even though I wasn't alive."

"Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one."

"This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by 'solving' it without addressing it."

"Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere."

"Discovering an inner history requires listening " and often not to the first story told."

"Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision."

"Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical."

"To understand desire, one needs language and flesh."

"One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance."

"When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests " personal metrics to reassure themselves."