Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Kathree sat alone on the beach, hugging her knees and watching the woman do what she did and wondering what events in her life had caused her to shift into what she was now, so tall, so lovely, so watchable. She did not have the manner of one who had been born beautiful, which made Kathree suspect that she had come by it through some kind of personal disaster.

This might sound like a foolish thing to have done, but a woman who has no family and few friends is forever skirting the edges of a profound despair, which derives from the fear that she could vanish from the world and leave no trace she had ever existed; that the things she has done shall be of no account and the perceptions she has formed [as of Dr. von Pfung for example] shall be swallowed up like a cry in a dark woods.

But one of the major functions of his Third World missionaries was to go out into the hinterlands and vaccinate people—and there was more than just vaccine in those needles.

Private Hott is with God now—or wherever people go after they die," says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root. "What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ! 'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?

So even the word "save" is being used in a sense that is grotesquely misleading—"destroy one version, save another" would be more accurate.

This went for Newgate as well. It was a pair of mighty fortress-turrets built on either side of a road that, as it wandered in from the countryside and crossed over Fleet Ditch, was named Holborn.

many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue. While creative, this approach has two drawbacks: 1) It clogs the plumbing, and 2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal crime. DON'T DO IT.

heliocentric orbits, come too close to the sun's heat

The total number of living humans was now sixteen.

In the way of neighbors, it at first had nothing but rubble and worn-out robots

We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.

Doesn't matter. Seeing her, talking to her, makes you feel bad. And at some level, your brain wants the thing that makes you feel bad to go away. Simplest reaction in the world. Doesn't make you a bad person. Doesn't mean you have to give in to it.

So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt.

had in mind a Dr. Waterhouse," Eliza said. "He was cut for the stone recently." The Marquis got the same aghast, cringing, yet fascinated look that all men did whenever the topic of lithotomy arose

People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an enviornment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort.

our Unarians reviewed summaries of the Sæcular news of the year just ended. Then, once every ten years, just before Decennial Apert, they reviewed the previous ten annual summaries and compiled a decennial summary, which became part of our library delivery. The only criterion for a news item to make it into a summary was that it still had to seem interesting. This filtered out essentially all of the news that made up the Sæcular world's daily papers and casts.

Había que humanizar los objetos, darles un nombre mono.

If wolves could become poodles in a few thousand years, think what humans could turn into, if there was a ne

I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And

the result of her having filled out a form, years ago, when she'd joined Lyke, and having clicked the "submit" button. Which, come to think of it, was a pretty strange bit of semantics

The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star.

After thanking everyone from God on down and then back up to God again, and then, as a precaution, tacking on a blanket thank-you for any persons or supernatural beings he had left out, he began:

All fine and simple in principle. The details very complicated, of course.