Quotes from Neal Stephenson

I love the scent of a man under pressure.

The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee.

had led him into the business of small-town marijuana dealing, which must have seemed dark and dangerous at the time, but that now, in these days of crystal meth, seemed as wholesome as running a lemonade stand.

Vyacheslav exited through New Caird's airlock, clambered down a stack of robots to the surface, and then made his way toward the site.

Due diligence people are easy to manipulate. You just have to act really diligent. They eat it up.

The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.

atmosphere, but she connected them anyway, as well as a power cable. Then she reached back behind her, all the way down to

Pronounces the name of everything created?' In many Creation myths, to name a thing is to create it. He is referred to, in various myths, as 'expert who instituted incantations,' 'word-rich,' 'Enki, master of all the right commands,' as Kramer and Maier have it, 'His word can bring order where there had been only chaos and introduce disorder where there had been harmony.

Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals—

Cnán knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.

a nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all died themselves, know a good death when they see one.

When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override.

THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full.

Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations—whiskey, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes—without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

If this had been France, and the Queen had been Louis XIV, it would have been done by now-but it was England, Parliament had its knobby fingers around the Monarch's throat, and Whigs and Tories were joined in an eternal shin-kicking contest to determine which faction should have the honor of throttling her Majesty, and how hard.

Most hacker types don't go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis.

overtaken every afternoon by a need for sleep so intense it was almost painful.

Well, that's good. I don't think human-written code exists anymore. It's code written by code written by code—turtles all the way down.

Rufus would have the boss's undivided attention for three hours, after which there would be something called a "hard stop.

Get where?" Yul demanded.

Don't have their own police force—no immigration control—undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that's the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.

Gedankenexperiment

For they'd come out into the hurricane where Threadneedle, Cornhill, Poultry, and Lombard all collided.

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one.