Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Tav started it," Aïda said. "He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.

Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is—as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms—having problems.

This is a very odd conversation," Dappa observed. "On an arbitrary numerical scale of conversational oddness, ranging from one to ten, with ten being the oddest conversation I've ever had, and seven being the oddest conversation I have in a typical day, this rates no better than five," Daniel returned.

The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes. The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer.

I'll buy it right now, Jack, said an English voice, somehow familiar, if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.

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.

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.

In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.' " Teague considered it for a moment, then nodded. "In Connaught," he added. "In Connaught," Bob agreed, then eyed the ditch.

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.

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.

War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.

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

You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo. "You spoke crooked words and I straightened them