Quotes from Neal Stephenson

And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy.

I don't get this, Hiro says. What is Snow Crash? It's a drug, asshole, the guy says. What do you think?

Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel's eye to comprehend—he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible—but

I hate e-mail," John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "What do you mean?" "The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.

SHE LET US INTO THE house, which had the subtle smell of old wood and old wool—as I used to imagine Victorian homes smelled in Victorian times, before I was recently alerted to the painful truth that actually, at least here in London, they stink of whale oil, patchouli (woven into shawls to keep worms from eating the fabric in transit), and backed-up sewers. I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense.

All the Chinese people Richard had ever met had been sophisticated urbanites, so he had been half expecting that he would end up carrying the girl Yuxia on his back. But it became clear almost immediately that she was half mountain goat, or whatever the Chinese equivalent of a mountain goat was.

Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate the solution of some especially tedious differential equations.

The West-march of the Walmart Held all the food in the world, Bottled beer by the boatload, Frost-kept food, milk and meat. Setting up for a siege behind barricades The Norsemen fetched food, collected clothing, Turkish trousers with flies in the front Kept closed with clever contraptions.

It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.

A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science.

So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders.

Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state-of-the-art hellhounds.

Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs.—What's the difference?

WITH CNÁN'S HELP, Raphael dressed the knife wound on Haakon's hip. Raphael moved stiffly, and Haakon eventually saw why. A tiny stub of a broken arrow protruded from Raphael's back. When Raphael finished with Haakon, Cnán said something about the arrow.

To be in a habitat—even a quite large and cosmopolitan one—when the Eye came around was, in pre-Zero terms, a little bit like being in a small town on the prairie and having a mobile Manhattan suddenly roll over the horizon, surround you, have a hundred kinds of intercourse with you, and then move on.

The place was empty 'cause of the Hanging. I didn't want to stay and—" "And what?" "Get more ahead of the others than I was already." "If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it—not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school.

All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.

These Burbclaves! These citystates! So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue.

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.

Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag.

First, I must be getting the money on my side, because after magic wanes money is the most powerful thing on earth (followed by weapons that destroy whole cities in a go, and religion—that never goes away, damn it!—and lastly, female actors who do not wear much clothing).

This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame's a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns.

To this point it probably looks like I am setting this up as a slam-dunk case for ambulating while working, and getting ready to lambaste treadmill-resistant managers as insensitive and tragically shortsighted knuckle draggers. Well, they are.

Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.