Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion... What's the difference

You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies. Like that. D'you see, boys?

Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor

This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about in new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.

THE LAY OF WALMART TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: "The Lay of Walmart" comprises two parts. Handwriting analysis confirms that both were written by the same author, self-identified as Tóki Olafsson, a skald

The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.

Well, 'vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves' is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe

Fearless for oneself, fear for others—that must be what it means to be a hero.

Better to lurk, observe, and merge

What are you doing?" Dengo would ask him. "Observing," father would say. "But how long can you observe the same thing?" "Forever.

What is your name?" Ariane asked him. The kid put up his deflector screens and said, "Einstein." Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer.

Put … the troll … down … and slowly back away.

All they had to do was follow skateboarders to the secret places they had long since discovered. Thrashers and nuclear fuzz-grunge collectives thrive in the same environment.

I was going to kill that doctor when he shoved his finger up my ass but then I realized the possibilities of that substance.

Well, I am not fully convinced that I really need this," Randy says. "We all need to decide that question for ourselves," says Avi.

Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers.

To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document.

She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed -- not a polite 'atchoo' but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action.

And then there's The Enforcers—but they cost a lot and don't take well to supervision. It is rumored that, under their uniforms, they wear T-shirts bearing the unofficial Enforcer coat of arms: a fist holding a nightstick, emblazoned with the words SUE ME.

Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.

It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.

Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport.

So, this place Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium

Well, land sakes! Hiro says. Lookee here! He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor. Better fire up the ol' barbeque, Jemima! Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face. Didn't anyone tell you, he says, losing the dialect, that I was a hacker? Then he hacks the guy's head off.