“I grew up in New Jersey. Our suburban house had a detached double garage with a small office built into one corner where my father wrote his books. On the wall in his office were a pair of photographs, side by side, in a single frame. One was of a naked woman immersed in water to her cleavage, the other was of a monkey also immersed in water to the middle of his chest. My father worked in that office in the garage from 1964 to 1969–from the time I was two years old until I was seven. During that period, many thoughts occurred to me about those photographs. I was sorry for her because someone had stolen her bathing suit and she couldn’t get out of the water. She even looked frightened and a little angry. The photograph of the monkey confused me. The monkey was ugly and old and [seemingly] had nothing to do with [the woman].”

“Eventually, I called my father to ask him about those photographs on his office wall. Before moving to New Jersey, my father had worked for TIME magazine which shared offices and an art department with LIFE magazine, since they were owned by the same company. The monkey, my father told me, was one of a shipload of rhesus monkeys brought to a tiny Puerto Rican island [Cayo Santiago (Ѻ)(Ѻ)] in 1938 where a free-ranging monkey colony was to be established for long-term study purposes.

After the monkeys disembarked, they immediately went crazy–fighting, screeching, swinging from trees, copulating. One elderly monkey took a look at the frenzied scene around him, walked out into the water up to his chest, and watched. He refused to return to shore for hours. The LIFE photographer who was covering the monkey-colony story took a snap. The photograph became one of the most reproduced images in the history of LIFE Magazine and was something of a legend in the offices where my father worked. In April of 1960, the photograph of the Italian film star Silvana Mangano was published on the cover of LIFE. The setting and her body position were nearly identical to the monkey’s, her expression as defiant and disdainful as his, so my father went upstairs to the art department and asked for copies of both photos. He had them mounted together and framed and then hung them above his desk. ‘I liked the juxtaposition,’ he said.”

McPhee's 2001 The Center of Things, wherein she outlines her quantum psychology theory of love.

“Although I am passionate about science I am no scientist—in fact, the only way I passed my physics for non-majors class in college was by writing an extra credit paper on the life of Marie Curie. The science in my novel comes mostly from articles in the New York Times Science Times section (I live for Tuesdays), and from popular science books such as Brian Green’s The Elegant Universe, Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory, John Gribben’s In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat, John Horgan’s The End of Science, John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, and everything written by Paul Davies.”

“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, nonlocality, eigenstates, Bell’s theorem, and the Aspect Experiment … wasn't actually Einstein's theory of special relativity that put the nail in the coffin of objective truth.”

— Jenny McPhee (2001), The Center of Things (pg. 38)

“There is probably some law of love equivalent to the principle of the conservation of energy: in a system—in this case, two people—the total love is constant. One person will have more, the other less. Two people with infinite love for each other defy the laws of nature and have to cancel each other out, like Romeo and Juliet.”

— Jenny McPhee (2001), The Center of Things (pg. 132)

“Easy”, Michael declared. “Take the first enigma. Is death the end of being or only an unknown transformation? With the development of nanotechnology” Michael explained, “the distinction between living and nonliving, natural and artificial, brain and computer, will become increasingly blurred—much in the same way as fiction and nonfiction have become ‘faction’.”

— Jenny McPhee (2001), The Center of Things (pg. 230)