Quotes from Neal Stephenson

He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance.

It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not acting like a real body. It reminds all The Black Sun's patrons that they are living in a fantasy world. People hate to be reminded of this.

In a sword-fighting drill, where one participant is going to mount an attack and the other is to respond in some way, the attacker is known as the agent and the respondent is known as the patient. The agent acts. The patient is passive.

Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means Cod, so Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns.

All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that's why we can't do anything else when we're sleeping: it's when we work hardest.

Fighting isn't about knowing how," Ty said. "It's about deciding to.

Zipper the Fatlanders called it. Cock-catcher it was to Hunfast, the hapless.

a rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female.

Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This

Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.

But when I tried to meet her eye now, she pointedly looked away, and fixed her red and swollen eyes on the big stained-glass window above the slate. Since (a) it was dark outside and (b) the window depicted Saunt Grod and his research assistants being beaten with rubber hoses in the dungeons of some Praxic Age spy bureau and (c) Tulia had already spent something like a quarter of her life in this room, I reckoned that inspecting the window wasn't really the point.

The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life—the deep structures—so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use Steiner's analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.

Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan's physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater.

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

The next morning the Fellowship, now filled out to a Tolkien-compliant head count of nine, simply walked

Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah's preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri

think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.

I don't even know how to describe it. 'Ragtag' makes it sound like more than it is.

Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, "What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible—you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?

but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise.

Far to the east, just above the horizon, was an especially big dot of light, like the clasp on a necklace. That would be the colossal structure of the Eye, currently stationed above the Atlantic.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I am not one of those who believes that God made the world and walked away from it, that He has no further choices to make, no ongoing presence in the world. I believe that He is everywhere, making choices all the time." "But only because there are certain things you have not explained yet with geometric proofs.

Sometimes I wonder who'll come after me, he says. Oh, we have plenty of excellent people in the next generation. But after that -- well, I don't know. I guess all old people feel like the world is coming to an end.

Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore. Right