Quotes from 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

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

there are no jaded, bored people in the high-tech industry, in the land of really good hardcore geeks. They all have a kind of intensity about what they're doing that makes it impossible for them to be bored or passionless. They are pretty driven, and they get a lot of joy from what they do, and it comes through

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

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.

The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning himself with such a tiny detail It is as if the don were going up and down highways picking up litter or something. But he nods respectfully, having just learned something: details matter.

Well, once I had recovered from childbirth - then she caught herself short, and smiled. What a ridiculous expression; I see now that I shall be recovering until the day I die.

To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude.

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

channeling Mongolian warriors. In 2007 Cooper fought a Chinese long-sword instructor on a Hong Kong rooftop—he never thought the experience would help him write battle scenes. In addition to being a member of the Mongoliad writing team, Cooper has written articles for various magazines.

The wording does not come naturally in this bastard language of Sabir, but Moseh's plan was to synergistically leverage the value-added of diverse core competencies into a virtual entity whose whole was more than the sum of its parts…

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.

From an evolution standpoint, what was the point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it. The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people—societies—rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something useful.

I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic forests there!" "What does that mean?" "Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.

In any crisis, survivors will always berate themselves that they could have done more," Léna said, almost to herself. She blinked and then her sharp focus returned to Ocyrhoe. "I should get you out of Rome," she said, almost as if to herself.

Much depended on how rapidly it would prove feasible to mass-produce inflatable structures; these made it possible to create much more spacious volumes by housing people in what amounted to thick-skinned balloons. But making balloons that could withstand atmospheric pressure indefinitely while also standing up to solar radiation, thermal swings, and micrometeoroids was no small project.

It had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each other not far away, trying to roll each other over, which runs contrary to the laws of mechanics even in the case of corgis that are lean and trim, which these were not. This struggle, which appeared to be only one skirmish in a conflict of epochal standing, had driven all lesser considerations, such as guarding the gate, from the combatants' sphere of attention...

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 businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this concept into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it might translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo.

The landscape of the suburban night has much weird beauty if you just look.

Csongor nodded. "It is a much better system," he said, "than the one we use in Hungary." "Why?" Csongor looked across at Marlon. "Because you get to choose." Marlon smiled. "Ah.

you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn't have to waste a lot of time talking.

For like a lot of young Moirans, Kath Two didn't even try to establish a fixed home. With a home came a social circle, and perhaps a family.

Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it.