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Neal Stephenson QUOTES

Neal Stephenson QUOTES

101 " ..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again. "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

102 " Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done. "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

103 " 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 , Snow Crash

104 " The difference between stupid and intelligent people -- and this is true whether or not they are well-educated -- is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambigous or even contradictory situations -- in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward. "

― Neal Stephenson , The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

105 " It’s, like, one of them drug dealer boats,” Vic says, looking through his magic sight. “Five guys on it. Headed our way.” He fires another round. “Correction. Four guys on it.” Boom. “Correction, they’re not headed our way anymore.” Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. “Correction. No boat. "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

106 " And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. "

― Neal Stephenson , Anathem

107 " THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. "

― Neal Stephenson , Seveneves

108 " We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. “Common as the air” meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver flow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving—no, demanding—of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona. "

― Neal Stephenson , The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

109 " 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 , Snow Crash

110 " 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 , Cryptonomicon

111 " ...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since. "

― Neal Stephenson , Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, #1)

112 " The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. 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. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books. "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

113 " But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard -to-pin-down striated pillow formation. "

― Neal Stephenson , Cryptonomicon

114 " The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along. "

― Neal Stephenson , Reamde

115 " Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise. "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

116 " All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it. "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

117 " The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

118 " Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same. "

― Neal Stephenson , Snow Crash

119 " He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly. "

― Neal Stephenson , The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

120 " any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint. "

― Neal Stephenson , Seveneves