Quotes from Neal Stephenson

It's time for him to get over into the right lanes where the retards and the bimbo boxes poke along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise's driveway like they don't know if it's a promise or a threat.

The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial.

Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo.

We're all nerds now. We might as well get good at it.

You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy—but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself.

It was not the sharp bracing fear one felt on an adventure

it would make things much simpler for a man like him if he knew she were unavailable.

The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.

Books are the single most efficient technology there is in terms of nimbleness and bang for the buck. You can present a whole universe in a book. It's produced simply by sitting in front of a typewriter or a computer and tapping on keys. There's no real limit to what you can conjure up in the reader's imagination by doing that. The book is irreplaceable.

The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements.

So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple geometric shapes. The avatars milling around the entrance don't seem to care.

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing.

And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.

People are my books," Ty said. "But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.

Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. "Topology is destiny," he said, and put the drawers on.

It is miserably clear that the video has been shot by a third conspirator who is burdened with a consumer-grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner-ear disease that he or she would like to share with others.

The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.

BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements—this is how they convince themselves they didn't get ripped off.

But in the time-honored manner of most human males, he allowed his eyeballs to swivel her way so that he could check her out, then turned his head so that he could check her out better.

Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.

The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.

After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage

A long fall. Dinah had ceased to even think in terms of up and down. The concept of falling had become meaningless to her.