Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was.

War gives men good ignoring skills.

Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.

When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again.

The rule of thumb we've been using is that Deolaters are welcome as long as they're not certain they're right," I said. "As soon as you're sure you're right, there's no point in your being here.

The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!

THE ROUGH TIMBERS of the monastery wall were aged and warped, and there were numerous gaps and holes in the wood. Covered in pitch, they were a poor defensive barrier, if they had ever been intended as such. Cnán and Finn approached the wood cautiously and dared to peek through the gaps. Whereupon

Arsibalt was horrified. "But how can you not be fascinated by—" "I am fascinated," I insisted. "That's the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two.

The people who know the most are not allowed to ask questions—or even to make suggestions. The least common denominator sets the standards. Just wait until you see Washington, Betsy—these goddamn car salesmen and small-town lawyers come into town every two years not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, and this enormously sophisticated and powerful and dangerous system is at their mercy. The Agency distorts information to fit the half-assed policies they scheme up.

in the group, as the knights preferred stallions—and knelt in the sun-dappled mud and grass of a narrow meadow. Raphael and Percival joined her, kneeling on the other side of the run, two steps back. Mongols at this late stage of their campaign often rode horses other than steppe ponies; war, as Feronantus had observed, was hard on horses, and armies continually replenished their stock. When Mongols rode larger and more complaisant Western horses

Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology.

Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?

There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily." —Alan Turing

Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction—the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.

the usual academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just differing perspectives.

The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2—216 power to be exact—and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how many digits a computer can recognize.

But unbidden and unwanted thoughts are the hardest to expel from one's mind.

A major street intersects, at something other than a ninety-degree angle, a smaller commercial street, defining two (smaller) acute-angle lots and two (larger) obtuse-angle lots. On one side of the major street, the obtuse-angle lot is occupied by a two-storey office building

Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past.

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed.

Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual?

Their skins were different colors but they all belonged to the same ethnic group: Military.

People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort.