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People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently - and generally better - than people who serve other masters." "So it is like believing in God." "Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty. -- Neal Stephenson
She slammed the book closed, ran to her bed, gathered her stuffed animals up in her arms, started chewing on her blanket, and cried for a while, considering the question of trolls. -- Neal Stephenson
That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about. -- Neal Stephenson
Sometimes, she worries about her mother, then she hardens her heart and thinks maybe the whole thing will be good for her. Shake her up a little. Which is what she needs. After Dad left, she just folded up into herself like an origami bird thrown into a fire. There -- Neal Stephenson
That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating shit. -- Neal Stephenson
Semper Fidelis
Dawn star flares on disk of night
I fall, sun rises -- Neal Stephenson
So through no rational process whatsoever I was the leader, And I had no idea what I was going to say. -- Neal Stephenson
Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value
seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does
it is a shared phant'sy. -- Neal Stephenson
Every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme - of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme. -- Neal Stephenson
Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. -- Neal Stephenson
True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent. -- Neal Stephenson
RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, say the street signs of Metro Manila. As soon as Randy saw those he knew that he was in trouble. -- Neal Stephenson
One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time. -- Neal Stephenson
That time in Seattle - during the lawsuit - was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive. -- Neal Stephenson
At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently. -- Neal Stephenson
Even the God of the New Testament is not as forgiving as the consumer credit system. -- Neal Stephenson
In the center of that open space, a bony woman in a threadbare garment was hunched over a dead plant.
Sword of Divine Fire's reaction was succinct: "Fuck!" The woman cringed as if he'd hit her with a bullwhip. Then: "What has happened to our potato? -- Neal Stephenson
I made it into Wikipedia," sang Erszebet. "I'll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia. -- Neal Stephenson
What do you mean?" Yul asked. -- Neal Stephenson
I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions. -- Neal Stephenson
She just didn't think it decent to live in a place where there were no coffee shops to have breakfast in when she woke up, -- Neal Stephenson
Time, tide, and comets waited for no man. -- Neal Stephenson
The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves. -- Neal Stephenson
Did you win your sword fight?"
"Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world."
"And you wrote the software."
"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says. -- Neal Stephenson
Dinah could spend the rest of her life living by her word, giving everyone a fair shake, and all of that. Rufus would no doubt approve of all those things. But it was not the charge he had given her. He had told her, though not in so many words, to get busy building a future. -- Neal Stephenson
they have commandos and astronauts who know this kind of thing cold." "But Raz, you are educable, you can learn 'this kind of thing,' if by that you mean how to maneuver an S2-35B and how to assemble a Cold Black Mirror. You've spent your whole life, ever since you were Collected, becoming educable. -- Neal Stephenson
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right. -- Neal Stephenson
All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty. -- Neal Stephenson
Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means Cod, so Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone
who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns. -- Neal Stephenson
They made data a controlled substance. -- Neal Stephenson
For members of the general public might not care about Wolf-Rayet stars in the Quintuplet Cluster, but they definitely saw why having hot rocks fall on one's head was a good thing to avoid. -- Neal Stephenson
This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure or lean something. But we have been changed. We are standing close the Heraclitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces. -- Neal Stephenson
Clyde had a theory that women had a book, a homemade, photocopied three-ring binder called "Surprising Things to Do in a Relationship," which they passed around to one another, adding pages from time to time, hiding it under the bed. He figured that Desiree could run home tonight and add a new page. -- Neal Stephenson
Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder's torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence. -- Neal Stephenson
For one of the toxic things about Lineages was that rich avout could get not-so-rich ones to do things for them in exchange for better food, better drink, and better lodging. -- Neal Stephenson
Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves. -- Neal Stephenson
Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. -- Neal Stephenson
Maybe this was all down to some supernatural effect, such as grace, that flowed through people's lives even if they didn't understand why. -- Neal Stephenson
Many a ship's officer, caught in a storm or battle, and seized by a natural tendency to freeze up in terror, was moved to action by the vivid helplessness of his crew. -- Neal Stephenson
I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by. -- Neal Stephenson
Daniel understood the complaint. For Daniel, too, had once designed a building, and savored the thrill of seeing it built, only to endure the long indignity of watching the owner clutter it up with knick-knacks and furniture. -- Neal Stephenson
The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you'd just hate to disappoint her. -- Neal Stephenson
Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here.
The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end. -- Neal Stephenson
How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell? -- Neal Stephenson
The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. -- Neal Stephenson
When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night. -- Neal Stephenson
He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. -- Neal Stephenson
She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the boom on him, she just gave a simple answer: No. -- Neal Stephenson
This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research. -- Neal Stephenson
It's just like the reviews promised - other people's ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me. -- Neal Stephenson
The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world."
"And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer. -- Neal Stephenson
It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail. -- Neal Stephenson
But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's own fears, to project confidence at all times. -- Neal Stephenson
Jad said, "The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters."
Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little. -- Neal Stephenson
Magical?" "Non." "Magnificent?" "Don't be absurd." "Less bleak than anything else we have seen?" "Now truly you are speaking French," the ambassador said approvingly. -- Neal Stephenson
Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. -- Neal Stephenson
The meeting would later be known as the Council of the Seven Eves. -- Neal Stephenson
Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying. -- Neal Stephenson
Later, he was to decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety. -- Neal Stephenson
He gave them descriptive names that wouldn't scare people. It wouldn't do to call them Nemesis or Thor or Grond. So instead it was Potatohead, Mr. Spinny, Acorn, Peach Pit, Scoop, Big Boy, and Kidney Bean. -- Neal Stephenson
The federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots. -- Neal Stephenson
The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears. -- Neal Stephenson
Kids need to get answers from humans who love them. -- Neal Stephenson
As soon as you open the door wide enough to admit pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, you have let in all of those other possibilities as well. -- Neal Stephenson
Ideology is a virus. -- Neal Stephenson
They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. -- Neal Stephenson
A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person -- Neal Stephenson
Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overlord, founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons. -- Neal Stephenson
Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about. -- Neal Stephenson
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. -- Neal Stephenson
The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest. -- Neal Stephenson
but not subjecting him to the tiresome demands of polite social interaction. -- Neal Stephenson
The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones, coming in from Reality: -- Neal Stephenson
Boredom is a mask frustration wears. -- Neal Stephenson
You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo. "You spoke crooked words and I straightened them, -- Neal Stephenson
I beg your pardon? Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you're talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault. -- Neal Stephenson
The West-march of the Walmart Held all the food in the world, Bottled beer by the boatload, Frost-kept food, milk and meat. Setting up for a siege behind barricades The Norsemen fetched food, collected clothing, Turkish trousers with flies in the front Kept closed with clever contraptions, Tiny -- Neal Stephenson
Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted
organisms
like me
are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we
were before. -- Neal Stephenson
He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice. -- Neal Stephenson
There's a little rack along the front of the counter bearing religious tracts, free for the taking, donation requested. Several slots on the rack are occupied by the Reverend Wayne's famous bestseller. How America Was Saved from Communism: ELVIS SHOT JFK. -- Neal Stephenson
She had stayed inside so that she could watch it on the TV in the room, let him know how it had looked on video, how the commentators and pundits had framed it. It -- Neal Stephenson
Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. -- Neal Stephenson
A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science. -- Neal Stephenson
Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man. -- Neal Stephenson
So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, re-reading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a -- Neal Stephenson
It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes. -- Neal Stephenson
It is miserably clear that the video has been shot by a third conspirator who is burdened with a consumer-grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner-ear disease that he or she would like to share with others. -- Neal Stephenson
whose picture appeared to be a state-issued ID of an octogenarian drag queen. I -- Neal Stephenson
The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got. -- Neal Stephenson
Judge Fang got to eat this way only when someone really important was trying to taint him, and though he had never knowingly allowed his judicial judgment to be swayed, he did enjoy the chow. -- Neal Stephenson
Indeed, cousine, I should rather you were a sincere Satanist than a pretend one; for the former recognizes God's majesty, and may be reformed, while the latter is an atheist, and doomed to the Lake of Fire. -- Neal Stephenson
Organizers had been able to find interpreters for. First up on the dais was Mary Bulinski, the United States secretary of the interior, an inveterate hiker and climber, spry at sixty. By training she was a wildlife -- Neal Stephenson
Morse code didn't leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she'd just had with Rufus. -- Neal Stephenson
Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. -- Neal Stephenson
A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. -- Neal Stephenson
And so what moved him onward and down the office building's stairway was not any sort of foolish hope that he could actually be saved, but competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic. -- Neal Stephenson
People are my books," Ty said. "But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep. -- Neal Stephenson
Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive. -- Neal Stephenson
Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it. -- Neal Stephenson
In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots. -- Neal Stephenson
Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them. -- Neal Stephenson
She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after ... She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable. -- Neal Stephenson
You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up -- Neal Stephenson
The insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness. -- Neal Stephenson
This is how it's done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up - sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your slab of granite that year - but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big. -- Neal Stephenson
Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being? -- Neal Stephenson
Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me. -- Neal Stephenson
every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say 'tis the other way round. -- Neal Stephenson
He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion. And she, maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't. Hiro -- Neal Stephenson
Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia. -- Neal Stephenson
Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead. -- Neal Stephenson
The difference between poets and mystics ... The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting. -- Neal Stephenson
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be - or to be indistinguishable from - self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time. -- Neal Stephenson
Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life. -- Neal Stephenson
I'm strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I'd probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea. -- Neal Stephenson
But what little I'd heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable. -- Neal Stephenson
The terminator - not the robotic assassin of moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet incessantly rotates. -- Neal Stephenson
Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book? -- Neal Stephenson
Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value. -- Neal Stephenson
us - I looked at that beautiful snow-capped mountain and named it Eliza. Because it was warm, fertile, and beautiful below, while being a bit frosty and inaccessible at the top - yet possessing a volcanick profile foretelling explosions - -- Neal Stephenson
You mentioned ... one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What ... is the other?"
"The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space? -- Neal Stephenson
It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, -- Neal Stephenson
Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell -- Neal Stephenson
In the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince. -- Neal Stephenson
These are one-time pads. -- Neal Stephenson
Donald Cameron has his own character in the world now!? Skeletor exclaimed, in somewhat the same tone of voice as a tribune might have said, Hannibal has crossed the Alps with elephants!? -- Neal Stephenson
The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken. -- Neal Stephenson
I just saved your fucking life, Mom ... It's like, if you
people of a certain age
would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures. -- Neal Stephenson
encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri, -- Neal Stephenson
Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever. -- Neal Stephenson
The last ship home has sailed. From now on, launch vehicles will rise up into orbit, but they will not go back for ten thousand years. -- Neal Stephenson
It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge. -- Neal Stephenson
Richard's ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn't enjoy that last cigarette. -- Neal Stephenson
In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability to create a whole world, as big and variegated as the one that he and the Magistrate lived in. But if this was true of the Innocent, it was true of the Condemned Man as well, and so he should not - no one should ever - be put to death. -- Neal Stephenson
All of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west -- Neal Stephenson
boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals - something -- Neal Stephenson
If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. -- Neal Stephenson
As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this it is pathetic self-delusion. -- Neal Stephenson
So far I have felt like a very inept slapstick performer." "Inept slapstick? Isn't that a bit redundant? -- Neal Stephenson
To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar,
motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document. -- Neal Stephenson
It's daytime. A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from the tank farm a mile away, like a time-lapse chrysanthemum. It is so vast and complicated in its blooming, uncontrolled growth that Rife stops halfway up the stairs to watch. -- Neal Stephenson
What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write. -- Neal Stephenson
Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it's warmer) sweet basil. -- Neal Stephenson
The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it -- Neal Stephenson
Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties. -- Neal Stephenson
Information Theory would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid dynamics would inform the hull of a ship. -- Neal Stephenson
He no longer had an accurate visual memory of the size of the moon in the sky, and so he could not estimate how many times larger the cloud was. -- Neal Stephenson
The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized. -- Neal Stephenson
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds. -- Neal Stephenson
If this all seems ambiguous, that's because it is; and if that troubles you, you'd hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying. -- Neal Stephenson
Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts. -- Neal Stephenson
What else can you tell us about this batna, Surendranath?" "I learnt it from English traders in Surat," said the befuddled Surendranath, "It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. -- Neal Stephenson
You told me that Christianity is the religion of peace."
"Ah, no. It is the faith for forgiveness. -- Neal Stephenson
Wolf-Rayet stars -- Neal Stephenson
Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it? -- Neal Stephenson
For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane. -- Neal Stephenson
Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways. -- Neal Stephenson
Lawrence concluded that Alan's penis scheme must have finally found a taker. -- Neal Stephenson
His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it. -- Neal Stephenson
While people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. -- Neal Stephenson
In fact, Kia is trans-just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn't trans- she is post-. -- Neal Stephenson
The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time. -- Neal Stephenson
L1, by process of elimination," Luisa said drily, and laughed. "You space people love to count down, I know your ways." "It's -- Neal Stephenson
All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days," she said, deadpan. -- Neal Stephenson
The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different. -- Neal Stephenson
When I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something
something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of. -- Neal Stephenson
I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support. -- Neal Stephenson
The answer is, I chose to seek my fortune. Failed. Lost all. Then got a fortune I had not ever looked for. Lost it though. Got it back. Lost it. Got another - the story is somewhat repetitious. -- Neal Stephenson
Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state-of-the-art hellhounds. -- Neal Stephenson
We see everything from the narrator's point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he's telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing. -- Neal Stephenson
That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God. -- Neal Stephenson
One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it. -- Neal Stephenson
Tekla wanted to slap her so much that her hand actually twitched. -- Neal Stephenson
It was humanly impossible to extend to seven billion people the full sympathy that each of them deserved. -- Neal Stephenson
I study dead languages for a living," I said. "That's why you hired me. Why should I be up to speed on your line of work? How's your Serbo-Croatian? What's your position on the relationship between Oscan and Marrucinian?" He -- Neal Stephenson
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us. -- Neal Stephenson
So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us? -- Neal Stephenson
It didn't matter whether "football" for you was soccer or the American sport played by men in helmets. -- Neal Stephenson
The suit's got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn't affect your hearing, but it does. -- Neal Stephenson
In the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations. -- Neal Stephenson
Penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters, -- Neal Stephenson
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. -- Neal Stephenson
I am what I am," Ty said. "And what is that?" Ariane asked. "A bartender. Always happy to make new acquaintances." He nodded at Bard. "Or to provide guests with drinks. Anyone thirsty? -- Neal Stephenson
It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words - are we discovering Truth, or just wanking? -- Neal Stephenson
The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness -- Neal Stephenson
These simple terms - "come about," for example - denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope. -- Neal Stephenson
Better to lurk, observe, and merge, -- Neal Stephenson
If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy. -- Neal Stephenson
Interesting things happen along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the same. -- Neal Stephenson
if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day. RAVENSCAR: -- Neal Stephenson
And he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover. -- Neal Stephenson
One of the great virtues of Confucianism was its suppleness. Western political thought tended to be rather brittle; as soon as the state became corrupt, everything ceased to make sense. Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage. -- Neal Stephenson
I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me. -- Neal Stephenson
I hadn't known that,' I said. 'I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there.' 'There might as well be,' Arsibalt said, 'but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. -- Neal Stephenson
This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame's a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. -- Neal Stephenson
Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. -- Neal Stephenson
The sun shafted in and made her eyes glow, picking out glints of yellow in irises that were mostly green and brown. -- Neal Stephenson
How does a poor country defeat rich ones?" "Indeed, the answer is not by acquiring wealth in the sense that France has it." "Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows?" "But rather to play a sort of trick and redefine wealth to mean something novel." "Currency!" "Indeed. -- Neal Stephenson
The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac's meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. -- Neal Stephenson
I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others. -- Neal Stephenson
You're going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan - then what? -- Neal Stephenson
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history. -- Neal Stephenson
But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book. -- Neal Stephenson
In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space. -- Neal Stephenson
If you can't test it, it's not theorics
it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy. -- Neal Stephenson
Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. "Topology is destiny," he said, and put the drawers on. -- Neal Stephenson
Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time. -- Neal Stephenson
I see there are no heroes any more. Where is my head of Joseph Kony on a plate? Slice him thinly so there's enough to go around. -- Neal Stephenson
To this point it probably looks like I am setting this up as a slam-dunk case for ambulating while working, and getting ready to lambaste treadmill-resistant managers as insensitive and tragically shortsighted knuckle draggers. Well, they are. -- Neal Stephenson
But the television news cameras couldn't get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew. -- Neal Stephenson
But your way isn't just that set of rules," Cord said. "It's who you are - you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you're talking about will sort itself out eventually. -- Neal Stephenson
Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives. -- Neal Stephenson
But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills. -- Neal Stephenson
Persons of quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company and gathering in clubs and coffeehouses to misinform one another. -- Neal Stephenson
It had been a hell of a long time since he had been reduced to hiding behind a tree, and he did not view it as much of a professional achievement. -- Neal Stephenson
His idea of a satisfying outdoor experience had been to saunter out onto the terrace of a European hotel to smoke cigars and drink brandy. -- Neal Stephenson
The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins. -- Neal Stephenson
Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith. -- Neal Stephenson
In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist. -- Neal Stephenson
I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk. -- Neal Stephenson
Meetings had never been her strong suit. She felt like she was playing an away game whenever she sat down in a conference room. Her awareness of this got in the way and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. -- Neal Stephenson
Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor -- Neal Stephenson
He liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it
say, in a nice stained-glass window
not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade. -- Neal Stephenson
It's when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain - sometimes illusory gain - that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse. -- Neal Stephenson
Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it ... a speelycaptor ... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words. -- Neal Stephenson
Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm. -- Neal Stephenson
Tales; Kim had heard them all, several times over. They were nothing he hadn't heard before when Onghwe had set up his Circus in other cities. He started to walk toward -- Neal Stephenson
And then there's The Enforcers - but they cost a lot and don't take well to supervision. It is rumored that, under their uniforms, they wear T-shirts bearing the unofficial Enforcer coat of arms: a fist holding a nightstick, emblazoned with the words SUE ME. -- Neal Stephenson
I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness. -- Neal Stephenson
The Japanese Mafia. Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as 'The Sicilian Yakuza'? Huh? -- Neal Stephenson
Get where?" Yul demanded. -- Neal Stephenson
What are letters?"
"Kinda like mediaglyphics except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use 'em to make short words for long words. -- Neal Stephenson
All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. -- Neal Stephenson
Once again, that startled, wary look. "I'm treating you to coffee," he said. That -- Neal Stephenson
The opening screen of T'Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this since he had heard that Google Earth in turn was based on an idea from some old science fiction novel -- Neal Stephenson
Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable. -- Neal Stephenson
He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern. -- Neal Stephenson
Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in-tune with nature. -- Neal Stephenson
Flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. - John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Step -- Neal Stephenson
Many set themselves the aim of rescuing the indifferent and the lazy - and end up lost themselves. The flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. - -- Neal Stephenson
You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That's how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin. -- Neal Stephenson
When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. -- Neal Stephenson
Ymir," Luisa said, pronouncing it as she'd heard Sean do: ee-meer. A word from Norse mythology referring to primordial ice giants. Sean's code name for a particular hunk of ice that his project had identified, and that he meant to bring back. "Yeah. -- Neal Stephenson
Ever think of introducing yourself?" Y.T. says.
"Nah," he says, "people always forget names. You can just think of me as that one guy, y'know? -- Neal Stephenson
Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here, he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection. -- Neal Stephenson
Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. -- Neal Stephenson
You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' ... -- Neal Stephenson
What makes you think they're spying on you?" "Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math - Evoked - and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again. -- Neal Stephenson
Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah's preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri -- Neal Stephenson
Human nature doesn't change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that. He snaps his fingers. -- Neal Stephenson
War gives men good ignoring skills. -- Neal Stephenson
Anyway, she was now the sort of girl who shot people. Useful to know. -- Neal Stephenson
Added. Apparently a mere two-cab caravan was not enough to trigger Ariane's anxieties, and so the one carrying -- Neal Stephenson
All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that's why we can't do anything else when we're sleeping: it's when we work hardest. -- Neal Stephenson
He is just your type," Uncle Meng said gently. "Please, do try not to fuck him."
"How come it's okay for James Bond? -- Neal Stephenson
Fighting isn't about knowing how. It's about deciding to. -- Neal Stephenson
As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another. -- Neal Stephenson
Why would that cause him to pack up his bolt, chord, and sphere, and hurry to Ecba, of all places? -- Neal Stephenson
If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience. -- Neal Stephenson
How can you remember shit like that?" Ty asked. -- Neal Stephenson
Your ability to have empathy with the Geometer - to imagine what it would be like to be someone else - isn't a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness. -- Neal Stephenson
THE RUSSIAN INVASION BEGAN A WEEK LATER, WITH A SPATE OF flights producing what NASA described as "mixed results" and Roskosmos termed "an acceptable fatality rate. -- Neal Stephenson
Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor. -- Neal Stephenson
Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer. -- Neal Stephenson
It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration. -- Neal Stephenson
Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code. -- Neal Stephenson
The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. -- Neal Stephenson
Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face? -- Neal Stephenson
All she knew was that a large strawberry-blond man suddenly appeared in her shop, intent on hugging her. This was unusual. To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been the kind of place for surprise visits. Larz -- Neal Stephenson
The damn bells kept ringing through the fog. Bud mumbled a command to his music system, a phased acoustical array splayed across both eardrums like the seeds on a strawberry. The volume went up but couldn't scour away the deep tones of the carillon, which -- Neal Stephenson
He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety-floating around on an ocean of generalized terror. -- Neal Stephenson
A gazebo on top of a welding rig" was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here. -- Neal Stephenson
Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window. -- Neal Stephenson
As soon as you're sure you're right, there's no point in your being here. -- Neal Stephenson
If it's wearing red, yellow, or both, it's a lama," he said. "Bow to it. -- Neal Stephenson
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. -- Neal Stephenson
Be as affronted as you please, just don't volunteer anything. If you see what appears to be an opening in debate, remember that it was ingeniously laid down in front of you by Bolingbroke as coquettes drop handkerchiefs at the feet of men they would ensnare. -- Neal Stephenson
I doubt you even know what duty is," she retorted. A risky response - such flippancy of the tongue - and it might provoke them, but showing fear would invite a response. Half of combat is causing your opponent to think you are stronger than you are, Gansukh had told her. Scarface -- Neal Stephenson
No," said Fraa Jad, "they are probably telling us that they have figured out that Edhar, Rambalf, and Tredegarh are where the Saecular Power stored all of the nuclear waste. -- Neal Stephenson
The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected with it, it lives in your brain forever. -- Neal Stephenson
The commentary came from millions of idiots on the Internet. -- Neal Stephenson
Being right does not always bring satisfaction, -- Neal Stephenson
If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him? -- Neal Stephenson
Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born. -- Neal Stephenson
confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every document that had ever been digitized was available to them, -- Neal Stephenson
Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan's physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater. -- Neal Stephenson
Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry. -- Neal Stephenson
I feared he might be trying to grow a beard again. -- Neal Stephenson
The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read. -- Neal Stephenson
Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same ethnic group: Military. -- Neal Stephenson
To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other -- Neal Stephenson
heliocentric orbits, come too close to the sun's heat -- Neal Stephenson
Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition. -- Neal Stephenson
People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey. -- Neal Stephenson
The Police Minister's toilet chided him -- Neal Stephenson
I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is. -- Neal Stephenson
If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. -- Neal Stephenson
Most of the people around the entrance were, of course, bellhops and taxi drivers. Guests went in and out. Some were dressed in business suits, others in casual tourist attire. He did not see any commandos in tracksuits. -- Neal Stephenson
She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed -- not a polite 'atchoo' but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action. -- Neal Stephenson
That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to? -- Neal Stephenson
Let's to the Kit-Cat Clubb. -- Neal Stephenson
He was neither dead nor here, but in Idaho, a state often confused, by bicoastal folks, with Iowa, but that in fact was the anti-Iowa in many respects, a place that Iowans would only go to in order to make some kind of statement. -- Neal Stephenson
The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature. -- Neal Stephenson
Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide. -- Neal Stephenson
In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to mention its title, Volume III of Principia Mathematica entitled, The System of the World, available shortly, where books are sold. -- Neal Stephenson
I am on an expense account that would blow your mind. -- Neal Stephenson
The pole's center was a gleaming lump about the size of a person's head, which any Spacer would recognize as a small nickel-iron asteroid, as common in space as dead leaves were on the reforested surface. But rare down here, even after the Hard Rain. -- Neal Stephenson
Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit. -- Neal Stephenson
The story is everything, so it always begins with a story. Research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much. -- Neal Stephenson
To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy. -- Neal Stephenson
His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow. -- Neal Stephenson
Being in the military is amazing; you give orders, and things happen. -- Neal Stephenson
The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called "air space" around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called "space space. -- Neal Stephenson
nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read. Elsewhere -- Neal Stephenson
Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be. -- Neal Stephenson
She definitely heard the words for airplane and airport, which delighted some little-girl part of her soul ("Yay, going on a trip!") even as her higher brain was ticking off all the bad things that could happen when men like Jones came into proximity with jet aircraft. -- Neal Stephenson
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box. -- Neal Stephenson
She knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. -- Neal Stephenson
When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. -- Neal Stephenson
Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames. -- Neal Stephenson
But even if they did have that kind of money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend their native frugality. -- Neal Stephenson
Two tires fly. Two wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs. -- Neal Stephenson
I don't hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn't there to make Englishmen of you, and so it's Irish you are, by default. -- Neal Stephenson
Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah, Waterhouse says, or words to that effect. -- Neal Stephenson
I was wondering when I was going to end up like this. -- Neal Stephenson
Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches - and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment -- Neal Stephenson
What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you? -- Neal Stephenson
This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. -- Neal Stephenson
It was a smart cane. When he grabbed the handlebars it would help him stand up. It would then steady his locomotion even on the roughest terrain, adding its six legs to his two. -- Neal Stephenson
She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata. -- Neal Stephenson
Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers. -- Neal Stephenson
What is the moral of your play, Jack?" "Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they've got Bibles, too." "Sound advice. -- Neal Stephenson
GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages. -- Neal Stephenson
The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening," Miss Pao said, "regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique." (describing a young man who flew off a bicycle at high speed) -- Neal Stephenson
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. -- Neal Stephenson
And she went on in this vein for a minute or two; she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes. -- Neal Stephenson
Downtown is before them, as high and bright as the aurora borealis rising from the black water of the Bering Sea. -- Neal Stephenson
We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies. -- Neal Stephenson
But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. -- Neal Stephenson
We don't believe in anything as simple as metempsychosis - the movement of an individual soul from one body to another. That's not what we mean by reincarnation at all." "What -- Neal Stephenson
Well, 'vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves' is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe, -- Neal Stephenson
I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption. -- Neal Stephenson
Orolo said, What if these two universes - each as big and as old and as complicated as ours - were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them. Would that be enough to wrench A's time and B's time into perfect lockstep for all eternity? -- Neal Stephenson
Also known as 'Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,' or in the original Welsh, 'Cwm Rhondda,'" added Sonar Taxlaw. -- Neal Stephenson
Edzard screamed at the men on the starboard side, threatening to throw them overboard if they didn't match the pace of the port team. -- Neal Stephenson
I think I'm in love, she said. He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up. -- Neal Stephenson
The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power. -- Neal Stephenson
It is what you don't expect," he'd said, "that most needs looking for." "Do -- Neal Stephenson
But Henry wasn't a parent, and he didn't understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep. -- Neal Stephenson
It's
my God
like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it. -- Neal Stephenson
Now there are many Shaftoes - mostly in Tennessee - but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler. -- Neal Stephenson
Shaftoe pulls off his dog tags and wraps the will around them, then wraps the dog tags' chain around the whole thing. He passes it down to the stern of the boat, where the boatman pockets it and cheerfully agrees to do the right thing with it when he gets back to Calamba. -- Neal Stephenson
If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, -- Neal Stephenson
Cord followed up with, "I like it here, but it's beginning to feel creepy. Does anyone else think it's creepy?"
"You're talking to a bunch of guys," Yul said. "No one here is going to validate your feelings." She tossed sand at him. -- Neal Stephenson
Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice," grumbled Newton. -- Neal Stephenson
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet. -- Neal Stephenson
there is no honour among consultants. -- Neal Stephenson
I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind. -- Neal Stephenson
There are only two industries. This has always been true ... There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment ... After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. -- Neal Stephenson
I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I'd rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am. -- Neal Stephenson
The last year had been an education in how little having money really mattered. A rich Vagabond was a Vagabond still, and 'twas common knowledge that King Charles, during the Interregnum, had lived without money in Holland. -- Neal Stephenson
Or a Moonie festival or something. -- Neal Stephenson
To condense fact from the vapor of nuance. -- Neal Stephenson
That man behaves so much like the villain in a work of literature, it's almost funny," Arsibalt observed. -- Neal Stephenson
just nuked . . . Venezuela? -- Neal Stephenson
That sounds like bulshytt! -- Neal Stephenson
A more down-to-earth project run by the Soviets had determined that eight square meters of algae - an expanse of pond scum about the size of two ping-pong tables - was needed to keep a single human supplied with oxygen. -- Neal Stephenson
Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto. -- Neal Stephenson
A rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female. -- Neal Stephenson
None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. -- Neal Stephenson
It is the fate of operating systems to become free. -- Neal Stephenson
If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy. -- Neal Stephenson
Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover -- Neal Stephenson
The little boy in him was crestfallen that he wasn't going on the adventure. Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable. -- Neal Stephenson
The first woman who spent any amount of time aboard this ship was Elizabeth de Obregon, whom we salvaged from the wrack of the Manila Galleon at the same time as him who burned it, one Edouard de Gex."
"He's dead, by the way."
"Again? I am glad to hear it. -- Neal Stephenson
Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's ready, the answer is always the same, sir! -- Neal Stephenson
Enoch ... why are you here?
Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical bodi in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover? -- Neal Stephenson
Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag. -- Neal Stephenson
Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on. -- Neal Stephenson
The Sword fled, and would have vanished utterly if the Pope had not granted them refuge in the ranks of the Teutonic Knights. -- Neal Stephenson
The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar. -- Neal Stephenson
Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind."
"Like instructions for programming a VCR. -- Neal Stephenson
Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline. -- Neal Stephenson
Overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it. -- Neal Stephenson
I have spent enough time around Puritans in general, and Boston Puritans in particular, to know what these people will tell her: lock up the library! Or -- Neal Stephenson
No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive. -- Neal Stephenson
She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high, -- Neal Stephenson
So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes. The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care. -- Neal Stephenson
Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man's work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes. -- Neal Stephenson
They were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them. -- Neal Stephenson
A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. -- Neal Stephenson
You should be a billionaire, Randy.
Thank god you're not."
"Why do you say that?"
"Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices - who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron. -- Neal Stephenson
In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions. -- Neal Stephenson
But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous. -- Neal Stephenson
My god, it is you I fear. I have written you a letter. Take pity on me. The heart of my god: have it given back to me. -- Neal Stephenson
He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn't consider it worthy of an extended answer. -- Neal Stephenson
Your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. -- Neal Stephenson
Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in bed. -- Neal Stephenson
to insist on everything's being reasonable, in a world that wasn't, was, in itself, unreasonable. -- Neal Stephenson
On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin. -- Neal Stephenson
Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. -- Neal Stephenson
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. -- Neal Stephenson
Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like X-rays through a wall. Probably -- Neal Stephenson
One of the ice cubes in Doob's glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing. Doob -- Neal Stephenson
So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders. -- Neal Stephenson
Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned. -- Neal Stephenson
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise. -- Neal Stephenson
his whimper dying in his throat. There had been a flash of white moonlight reflecting off pale skin, and when the second one passed, he clapped his hand over his mouth to stifle his cry of terror at what he saw. The -- Neal Stephenson
I don't think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It's because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives. -- Neal Stephenson
If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time. -- Neal Stephenson
Markus's mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: Is the president nuking people again? -- Neal Stephenson
That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code. -- Neal Stephenson
Sergeant Major," Arjun said quietly, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Yur snorted. "Is that a fancy way of saying it's above my pay grade, sir? -- Neal Stephenson
One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'. -- Neal Stephenson
Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was. -- Neal Stephenson
What should we be doing in the meantime?"
"All of the things you will look back on fondly later when you have not been able to do them for a long time. -- Neal Stephenson
He is flitting and hopping about in the lobby like a sparrow whose nest had just been blown down in a windstorm. -- Neal Stephenson
By outward appearances, Cantabrigia Five was a video journalist. But it made sense that, in a world where no police or military action could be judged successful unless it looked good to ordinary persons watching it on video screens, she was also a general. -- Neal Stephenson
The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality [ ... ] -- Neal Stephenson
Gold is the corpse of value... -- Neal Stephenson
Extremely dangerous drug-related occupations for which decoy served as a paid audition of sorts. A start weapons system was a wise investment. The -- Neal Stephenson
The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian. -- Neal Stephenson
There are always fuckups, and there is always a goat. Sometimes the goat is you. -- Neal Stephenson
I heard an older, softer male voice say. I knew that voice had a name attached to it - Yoda? No, Yoda was from Star Wars. Star Wars was on my mind because of R2-D2. -- Neal Stephenson
But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now. -- Neal Stephenson
The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way. -- Neal Stephenson
Reality is what we make it. Or what is made for us by the companies we keep. It is our clay from which we fashion ourselves. -- Neal Stephenson
THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. -- Neal Stephenson
Gratitude and obedience. At The Frogs, the relationship between a knight and the people was clearly understood. -- Neal Stephenson
Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity. -- Neal Stephenson
It was more likely that they would lose consciousness from the gee forces first - a relatively painless way to go. -- Neal Stephenson
Wired people should know something about wires. -- Neal Stephenson
Fearless for oneself, fear for others - that must be what it means to be a hero. -- Neal Stephenson
As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation," the first MetaCop says. "You stay cool and we'll stay cool," the second MetaCop says. -- Neal Stephenson
Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage. -- Neal Stephenson
Emacs is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. -- Neal Stephenson
Well," says Uncle Enzo. It is the "well" that begins the end of a
conversation. "I was going to send you some roses, but you wouldn't really be
interested in that, would you? -- Neal Stephenson
His real job - the job that the Owners paid him for - was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls. -- Neal Stephenson
I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there."
There might as well be, "Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators. -- Neal Stephenson
I just saved your fucking life, Mom ... You could at least offer me an Oreo. -- Neal Stephenson
from a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilometers, depending on how fat you were and whether -- Neal Stephenson
Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all the good stuff was use to grease propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War. -- Neal Stephenson
Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov's habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man. -- Neal Stephenson
SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn. -- Neal Stephenson
Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes. -- Neal Stephenson
It irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I'm forced to do exactly what's expected. -- Neal Stephenson
My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to -- Neal Stephenson
I am an Aleut." "Oh, I've never heard of that." "That's because we've been fucked over," the big scary Aleut says, "worse than any other people in history. -- Neal Stephenson
In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games. -- Neal Stephenson
For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. - HOBBES, Leviathan -- Neal Stephenson
They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power. -- Neal Stephenson
No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge," Dr. Waterhouse reminds him. -- Neal Stephenson
Until recently, he had been sustaining a fairly credible cover story about being a peaceful wine merchant in Cradle. -- Neal Stephenson
Parents of small children must perforce have an entirely different sense of irony than unimpaired humankind. -- Neal Stephenson
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places, -- Neal Stephenson
Maybe that's how great warriors do it. Carelessly, not wracking their minds with the consequences. -- Neal Stephenson
I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun. -- Neal Stephenson
Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless. -- Neal Stephenson
I get it," Richard said. "But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods? -- Neal Stephenson
There was silence around the big table in the Banana. -- Neal Stephenson
DMS is energetic and enterprising to a degree that from time to time leaves certain persons (e.g. those burdened with a petty fear of death or torture) uneasy (see my prior speculation as to possibility DMS may have been born with a redundant Y chromosome). -- Neal Stephenson
What are you doing?" Dengo would ask him. "Observing," father would say. "But how long can you observe the same thing?" "Forever. -- Neal Stephenson
What's an adventure? Nell said. The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with -- Neal Stephenson
Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing - this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing - is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths. -- Neal Stephenson
Parking lots and chaos. -- Neal Stephenson
it has left a neat bomb-shaped hole in the deck, just like a panicky Warner Brothers cartoon character passing at high speed through a planar structure such as a wall or ceiling. -- Neal Stephenson
There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery -- Neal Stephenson
In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman. -- Neal Stephenson
He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance. -- Neal Stephenson
How could a man become a god?" Nell asked. "By living in an extremely pragmatic society," said Constable Moore after some thought -- Neal Stephenson
Dr. Harris was now wishing that the late Doc Dubois had never opened his big fat mouth. -- Neal Stephenson
It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers. -- Neal Stephenson
Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules. -- Neal Stephenson
But I have to warn you that this is the word - 'politics' - that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization. -- Neal Stephenson
I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous. -- Neal Stephenson
Like a handful of nickels in a batch of bread dough this could be kneaded from place to place but never removed. -- Neal Stephenson
People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes. -- Neal Stephenson
One sort of glib explanation I heard once was that Rhetors could change the past, and were glad to do it, but Incanters could change the future - and were reluctant. -- Neal Stephenson
A collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach), -- Neal Stephenson
I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up. -- Neal Stephenson
It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere. -- Neal Stephenson
If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it. -- Neal Stephenson
This Snow Crash thing
is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference? -- Neal Stephenson
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it. -- Neal Stephenson
-How long do you want these messages to remain secret?[ ... ]
+I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil. -- Neal Stephenson
anchored ships and over the shallow bar had been dangerous, but -- Neal Stephenson
Plane-change maneuvers are expensive. -- Neal Stephenson
On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. -- Neal Stephenson
If no one is barfing, then none of us is likely to die, at least over a time span of weeks. -- Neal Stephenson
What is your name?" Ariane asked him. The kid put up his deflector screens and said, "Einstein." Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer. -- Neal Stephenson
The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. -- Neal Stephenson
The same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom. -- Neal Stephenson
Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence? -- Neal Stephenson
It gave them something to do and it took their mind off the way Yuxia was driving, which, had they paid attention to it, might have been the most frightening thing they had seen all day. -- Neal Stephenson
His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other activities. -- Neal Stephenson
My son, in the eyes of Heaven, we are all as little children. No one of us is more important than another. In fact, the more important we think we are, the less we stand out in the eyes of the Lord. -- Neal Stephenson
I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and clothing. -- Neal Stephenson
The cloud, in other words, became not just a physical cloud of flying objects in space but a computational cloud as well, a free-floating, self-regulating Internet. -- Neal Stephenson
Unfortunately, this category of secret is itself so secret that it's very existance is secret, and he can't actually reveal it to anyone. -- Neal Stephenson
The mind knows ... that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story. -- Neal Stephenson
But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened. -- Neal Stephenson
It wasn't just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A -- Neal Stephenson
What, not coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding's scrotum? -- Neal Stephenson
When you just wing it, you are aware of the risk and the uncertainty, and inclined to be more cautious. When you have a high-tech tool giving you an illusion of omniscience, I am concerned that it will lead to greater risk-taking. LYONS: -- Neal Stephenson
Any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint. -- Neal Stephenson
The question is, how long does Mr. Spinny have to live? And what does that tell us? -- Neal Stephenson
The ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. -- Neal Stephenson
We are all in trouble ... with a bunch of dead people. -- Neal Stephenson
She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward. -- Neal Stephenson
HE WORKED IT OUT FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES ON THE WHITEBOARD -- Neal Stephenson
And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would construe as creative. -- Neal Stephenson
These women stared out from the canvases with arched brows, enormous eyes and tiny mouths, seeing much, and saying little. -- Neal Stephenson
He stares at the crowd, five thousand potential market shares, young people with funkiness on their minds. -- Neal Stephenson
And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes. -- Neal Stephenson
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons? -- Neal Stephenson
Boy knows much about the layout of the Mongol camp. The older man squeezed Hans's -- Neal Stephenson
She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn't feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method. -- Neal Stephenson
Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith - faith in your U-boat, and your crew - beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing. -- Neal Stephenson
After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, -- Neal Stephenson
Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits. -- Neal Stephenson
There was nothing you couldn't accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years. -- Neal Stephenson
BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements - this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off. -- Neal Stephenson
The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex. -- Neal Stephenson
So efficient it doesn't waste power by making noise -- Neal Stephenson
Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport. -- Neal Stephenson
Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. -- Neal Stephenson
And yet people went on thinking this way, kind of in the way that someone who has just been diagnosed with a terminal illness will go on getting up and going to work every morning, not so much out of habit as because the knowledge of impending doom makes them wish to assert an identity. -- Neal Stephenson
some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic. -- Neal Stephenson
In a sword-fighting drill, where one participant is going to mount an attack and the other is to respond in some way, the attacker is known as the agent and the respondent is known as the patient. -- Neal Stephenson
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. -- Neal Stephenson
Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion ... What's the difference -- Neal Stephenson
Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. -- Neal Stephenson
The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture. -- Neal Stephenson
The constant dangers of sudden electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking up and down as well as side-to-side. -- Neal Stephenson
A long fall. Dinah had ceased to even think in terms of up and down. The concept of falling had become meaningless to her. -- Neal Stephenson
Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers. With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous. -- Neal Stephenson
Show some fucking adaptability! -- Neal Stephenson
Class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. -- Neal Stephenson
I'm surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new technology first! -- Neal Stephenson
But around the time Manila heaves into view, a warm breeze springs up over the deck and all of the Marines sigh, as if they have all ejaculated in unison. -- Neal Stephenson
Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel's eye to comprehend - he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible - but -- Neal Stephenson
Y.T. knows he's a computer guy because he has long hair in a ponytail and he's wearing jeans and he seems gentle. -- Neal Stephenson
But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence. -- Neal Stephenson
Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. -- Neal Stephenson
Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. -- Neal Stephenson
At this point in their lives, neither one of them is important enough to kill, kidnap, or interrogate. -- Neal Stephenson
Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie" - which doesn't include you, Julia - "will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint. -- Neal Stephenson
There followed one of those comical interludes in which the jihadists were confused about what to do next and fell to bitter recriminations. -- Neal Stephenson