Quotes from Neal Stephenson

enhanced the physics of The Black Sun to make it a little cartoonish, so that particularly obnoxious people can be hit over the head with giant mallets or crushed under plummeting safes before they are ejected.

Other people would want to sentimentalize about the old days, but the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship could be counterfeited when it was being minted anew from moment to moment. "I

us—I looked at that beautiful snow-capped mountain and named it Eliza. Because it was warm, fertile, and beautiful below, while being a bit frosty and inaccessible at the top—yet possessing a volcanick profile foretelling explosions—

Here in the First World, everyone has already been vaccinated, and we don't let religious fanatics come up and poke needles into us. But we do take a lot of drugs.

By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart. —Confucius

some darting about for Earthly advantage, others attending to the faraway deeds of Angels, still others lost in contemplation of what it all means.

Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was.

class is more than income—it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.

No one would be fooled, but propriety would be maintained.

Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches—and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment

You're assuming," Luisa said, "that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward." Doob pulled his tablet closer and started trying to find Tav's blog. "To what extent do you imagine she really is reporting facts about the AC? As opposed to creating the reality she describes?" Doob asked. "What's the difference?" Luisa asked.

Footsteps and jolly hallooing come his way: sounds more terrible to his ears than the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen, for they signify that he shall have to be civil to chaps he barely knows.

And he can convert millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus—people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the National Enquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert.

Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after. ... She doesn't want you to understand her. She wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.

Que una industria semejante pudiera existir le pareció extraño e improbable hasta que leyó un artículo donde se calculaba que el tamaño de la economía mundial del oro virtual oscilaba entre los mil y los diez mil millones de dólares al año.

But the lieutenant remembers it. He's really good at remembering numbers. Aren't you, sir?" Enoch shrugs modestly. "Where I grew up, memorizing the digits of pi was the closest thing we had to entertainment.

But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.

These men, of course, have names and lives, but Daniel has forgot the former, and has no interest in the latter.

Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overlord, founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

within the room, and then gales of laughter. The nacre

the one and only key to a successful nap was to break the thread of consciousness just long enough for the switch to be thrown to "off." When it got thrown to "on" again, even if it was only a few minutes later, the brain–body system rebooted itself, like a fucked-up computer that just needs to be unplugged from the wall for ten seconds and restarted in order to come back to life in clean working order.

You need to tend to your own faults, young fellow—excessive sobriety, e.g…" "A tendency to fret—" Pepys put in. "Undue chastity—let's back to the tavern!

As his heart's rapid drumbeat slowed, Andreas took in the richness of the forest. An endless number of drifting motes outlined beams of sunlight that cut between the trees like blessings from Heaven. We are these specks of dust, he reflected, and it is the design of the Divine Light that brings us together. We cannot see the whole of the Light, but in our passing, we give it form.