Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was. (Enoch Root observes six-year-old Isaac Newton)

He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they're scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action.

if the entire world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets, then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large composite numbers.

The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

It is what you don't expect," he'd said, "that most needs looking for.

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

Remember, these things are designed for amateurs." "Tell me about it," Ivy snorted. "The user interface is so easy to use, I can't do anything.

Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work.

but she didn't really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the right-thinking Americans to break away in disgust.

To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been the kind of place for surprise visits.

This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth.

These people are as happy as, say, Fraa Orolo. They get what they want: naked ladies on their wheels. He gets what he wants: upsight to the mysteries of the universe.

The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.

People who like math. So I was trying to imagine—" "When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?" "Yes.

Commuters lining up at the tube stations, waiting to cross the Causeway into Greater Shanghai, seen only as a storm front of neonstained, coal-scented smog that encompassed the horizon.

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

You're just clever enough to be stupider than if you weren't clever at all

He did not seem to grasp something that was clear enough to me and Cord: namely, that there were extras who would beat up avout simply because it was more entertaining than not beating them up—not because they subscribed to some ridiculous theory of what we were. He was assuming that rapscallions bothered to have theories.

They were like three-year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence's first year went by almost instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing, than Hawaii.

The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low winter sun. Crystalline

they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T'Rain and see what they were missing.

Hygiene isn't really about dirt. It's about germs. It's to prevent the spread of sequences that are dangerous if they are allowed to propagate. We don't think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.

Reptiles are just retarded birds," said the King of the Birds, "and so I am your King, thank you very much.

The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared.