Quotes from Neal Stephenson

No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.

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).

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

this is the word—'politics'—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.

She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut had spawned terabytes of Internet commentary from men, and a few women, who apparently had nothing else to do with their time.

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.

Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.

Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market. "So you're going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?

You're British, you're a priest, you're a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse Code, and most importantly of all, you're a fucking pain in the ass – so off you go!

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.

In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.

Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers.

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.

THE MONASTERY GATE was as weak as Finn surmised, the timbers splintering after three strong kicks from Finn's boot. Using his spear as a wedge, he ripped and tore the rotted wood away until there was a large enough hole to pass through. After ducking and looking, he went first, leaping nimbly through the gap. Cnán followed, more readily and eagerly than she had anticipated, and Yasper came close on her heels.

Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones. The goal of all such persons seems to be to make themselves cuddly and nonthreatening.

The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores.

An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.

But the Owners really valued the Crow's Nest partly as a cultural institution and partly because it gave them access to the sort of information about the lives, thoughts, and deeds of important persons that could only be had in a bar.

I get it," Richard said. "But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?

It wasn't only the Lorites who said that is not a new result. People re-invented the wheel all the time. There was nothing shameful in it. If the rest of us oohed and aahed and said, "Gosh, a wheel, no one's ever thought of that before," just to make that person feel good, nothing would ever get done.

Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail.

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.

Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?

I feared he might be trying to grow a beard again.