Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Stand-up peeing in a long flowing garment could lead to various mishaps.

for now, none of the lights are on and that's all there is, black steel and slate sky.

But that was one of those errands that, if not achieved in the first twelve hours, would remain undone centuries later.

If he's got a big yellow scarf over his left shoulder, he's the king. Bow lower in that case.

What do you think of her?" Csongor asked. "Is she your girlfriend?" "For a while I was thinking maybe," Marlon admitted, "but then I decided she was my sister." "Huh." "China is funny. One child per family, you know. We are all looking for siblings.

Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste.

Even though he's just a piece of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references.

And it must be understood that the adjective "white" here means a true, blinding salt-white, and not the dirty beige that passes for white in poorly illuminated textile markets.

But our relationship to these infinite pasts and futures isn't random—plausibility throws its weight around, per some freaky quantum mechanics stuff that Dr. Oda calls Feynman Diagram History Pachinko.

Dinah slipped her hand into the data glove, did the thing that made it connect to the Grabb's free claw, and waved. Tekla's green eyes flicked down in their sockets as she observed this. Still no emotion. Dinah was mildly offended. Was the Grabb not adorably cute, in its ugly mechanical way? Was the wave not an amusing gesture?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo," Enoch said.

You know what, though? It's all entertainment. Real or made up. It's stuff that people watch on screens or varps. Red gets that.

a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka.

Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see?

Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable.

HE WORKED IT OUT FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES ON THE WHITEBOARD

There's an office?" I said. "I assumed your shadowy government entity had you working out of your car." "It's near Central Square. Carlton Street, about fifteen minutes' walk from the Apostolic Café. How's Chinese sound?" "Depends on the dialect." "Ha," he said without smiling. "Linguist humor. Pretty lame, Stokes.

Its title was "Virtual-Space Cartography from Manifold-Based Traffic Analysis.

Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue.

Dr. Emanuel Lagos.

But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings.

Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said.

Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and other property. So they put money they didn't really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff. There's no use for any of it. So they come here sometimes and 'vote with bullets.

In movies, SF dominates utterly: by my count, 57 of the top 100 movies of all time, and nine of the top ten. The only top ten film that isn't SF is Titanic, made by a director who cut his teeth making SF films.