Neal Stephenson Quotes

Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's ready, the answer is always the same, sir!

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.

I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?

As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this it is pathetic self-delusion.

Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

Once again, that startled, wary look. "I'm treating you to coffee," he said. That

It is what you don't expect," he'd said, "that most needs looking for." "Do

Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was.

As soon as you're sure you're right, there's no point in your being here.

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.

to insist on everything's being reasonable, in a world that wasn't, was, in itself, unreasonable.

If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy.

Markus's mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: Is the president nuking people again?

Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?

If no one is barfing, then none of us is likely to die, at least over a time span of weeks.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

from a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilometers, depending on how fat you were and whether

My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to

It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.

Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.

Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable.

The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones, coming in from Reality:

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.

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

I think I'm in love, she said. He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up.

People are my books," Ty said. "But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.

RESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, say the street signs of Metro Manila. As soon as Randy saw those he knew that he was in trouble.

Dr. Harris was now wishing that the late Doc Dubois had never opened his big fat mouth.

We are all in trouble ... with a bunch of dead people.

What do you mean?" Yul asked.

These women stared out from the canvases with arched brows, enormous eyes and tiny mouths, seeing much, and saying little.

Why do they believe that?" "Because we are hackers," Csongor said, "and they have seen movies.

every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say 'tis the other way round.

Kids need to get answers from humans who love them.

His comb had left visible, parallel grooves through his heavily gelled brown hair, like the tracks of fleeing dinosaurs in a fresh volcanic mudflow.

His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other activities.

Boredom is a mask frustration wears.

Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.

It was more likely that they would lose consciousness from the gee forces first - a relatively painless way to go.

The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I

Anyway, she was now the sort of girl who shot people. Useful to know.

Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits.

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

She's in shock. Keep her head low and her legs high,

These are one-time pads.

A gazebo on top of a welding rig" was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here.

That sounds like bulshytt!

some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic.

Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport.

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?

Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline.

It wasn't just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A

In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.

Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor

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.

The stars' positions were randomly generated, a fact that drove Pluto crazy.

Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder's torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence.

nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read. Elsewhere

encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri,

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.

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.

The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac's meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away.

At this point in their lives, neither one of them is important enough to kill, kidnap, or interrogate.

It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.

Semper Fidelis
Dawn star flares on disk of night
I fall, sun rises

remember that "layman" is just a polite word for "idiot.

In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.

There was silence around the big table in the Banana.

The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.

I made it into Wikipedia," sang Erszebet. "I'll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.

Disaster' is an astrological term meaning 'bad star.

He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.

The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way.

In the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations.

No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive.

The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements.

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.

THE PREMISE OF THIS BOOK CAME TO ME CIRCA 2006,

Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity.

The Sword fled, and would have vanished utterly if the Pope had not granted them refuge in the ranks of the Teutonic Knights.

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.

I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.

Tekla wanted to slap her so much that her hand actually twitched.

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.

but not subjecting him to the tiresome demands of polite social interaction.

heliocentric orbits, come too close to the sun's heat

If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

But even if they did have that kind of money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend their native frugality.

Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. - HOBBES, Leviathan

There followed one of those comical interludes in which the jihadists were confused about what to do next and fell to bitter recriminations.

So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?

Being in the military is amazing; you give orders, and things happen.

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.

the question hung there like an invisible wall of flatulence

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.

Parking lots and chaos.