Quotes from Neal Stephenson

His mind was good, but he only understood one or two things in the whole world—samurai movies and the Macintosh—and he understood them far, far too well. It was a worldview with no room for someone like Juanita.

It's like putting on crampons and trying to walk through a room full of puppies.

For the most part they were oddly cheerful. Beyond a certain point it was all just kicking through wreckage.

The padlocks are carried away in pomp and laid out on the stone bench where important men make it their business to keep an eye on them.

was a truism that, at your own wedding, you never actually got to have a real conversation with all the dear friends and family who had gathered to celebrate it.

Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.

a collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach)

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story.

As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R." "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned.

His role, in the end, had been reduced to this one thing: sitting in the corner of meeting rooms or lurking on corporate email lists, seeming not to pay attention, growing ever more restless and surly until he blurted something out that offended a lot of people and caused the company to change course. Only later did they see the shoals on which they would have run aground if not for Richard's startling and grumpy intervention.

Debris of beer cans, Subway wrappers, and chip bags attested to the fact that Jules, by dint of youth, good genes, and an active lifestyle, could consume as many calories as he pleased with zero impact on the eminently fuckable physique on display through his tie-dyed tank top and his voluminous cargo shorts.

Thirty seconds later, he's down in the cargo hold, Paul Bunyaning a crate of .45-caliber ammunition.

The three-ringer gives her a quick look, just long enough to make sure she is really a person, not a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump.

they were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them.

Indeed. It led to a renaissance," Root says, "like in the seventeenth century, when the Puritans tore everything to rubble and then slowly built it back up from scratch.

On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin.

It was hard to tell whether he was looking at a water heater, an abandoned refrigerator, or a human being. When it moved a little, he decided the latter

If it's wearing red, yellow, or both, it's a lama," he said. "Bow to it.

If it's a first notice, Jason likes to drop by in person, just to show the flag, to emphasize that his organization takes a personal, one-to-one, hands-on, micromanaged approach to debt-related issues.

That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?

Oh come on, you did it yourself when you saw the billboard at the airport. 'Ugh! Blue hair! How tasteless!' When you did that, you identified, you categorized that character as belonging to the Other. And once you have done that, attacking it, murdering it, becomes easier. Perhaps even an urgent need.

These are one-time pads.

The windows on the Dovetail side of the gatehouse were larger, and she could see the two corgi dogs outside, peering in through the lead latticework, flabbergasted that they had, through some enormous lacuna in procedure, been left on the outside, wagging their tails somewhat uncertainly, as if, in a world that allowed such mistakes, nothing could be counted on.

But I do know that the Germans know that we are here," Shaftoe said, "you just told me." "No, no no no no," Benjamin said, "wait until you would know that the Germans knew even if you didn't know from being told by Colonel Chattan over the radio." "Are you fucking with me?" "Orders," Benjamin said, and handed Shaftoe the deciphered message as proof.