Quotes from Neal Stephenson

The account presented below is patterned after the work of Christia Mercer of Columbia University. Her book Leibniz's Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development, published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press, is a formidable work of forensic scholarship that can in no way be improved by my attempts to summarize

can't say I mourned my failure overmuch, as it meant I'd get a free trip to New Orleans out of it, and that would rock be most excellent. I DROVE BACK to the office late in the day to find Tristan collapsed on the couch from exhaustion.

This had led to college and grad school and a long dispiriting run of un- and underemployment, since the economy didn't seem interested in comparative religion majors.

He was a sniper scout, and it was in his nature to do crazy shit like this; but it was also part of his training to scan the terrain carefully before venturing in.

and so anything you could do that made you norMAL was desirable; and since that could easily be faked, it worked best if it were some activity that would get you killed if you did it wrong.

Kim smiled. "Would I give you the satisfaction of seeing that?

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

you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.

It's a cloud computing term. When you need a virtual machine in the cloud, or a whole cluster of them, you go on Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors and spin up an 'instance.

The constant dangers of sudden electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking up and down as well as side-to-side.

Politics." Doob sighed. Luisa chuckled. "I hear you, sugar. I'm not gonna say you're wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—'politics'—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.

If we assume that the arms grew outwards from the center, then there must be something in that center that imbues each of the six arms with the same organizing principle

Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a great our lesser extent, assembly line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.

L1, by process of elimination," Luisa said drily, and laughed. "You space people love to count down, I know your ways." "It's

in an unguarded moment.

And so even if Hope was a contrived thing — a mechanism that popped up out of Pandora's Box by dint of levers and springs — it was by no means bad.

They stared back at him wide and unblinking.

like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds.

He stares at the crowd, five thousand potential market shares, young people with funkiness on their minds.

It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake.

It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined," d'Avaux corrected her. "If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.

no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls—otherwise, the world's largest collection of closed and locked doors.

What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?" Enoch asked.