Quotes from Neal Stephenson

I grew weary of keeping up, Doctor. That is my story, if you must know. I grew weary of transitory knowledge, and decided to seek knowledge of a more æternal nature.

All birds are bastards.

Bulshytt: 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.

This is the postmodern era. When events come to a cusp, we're supposed to screw our courage to the sticking place and launch a reanalysis of the eleventh draft of the working document.

Algunos dicen que la bipolaridad es una adaptación útil. Cuando las cosas van mal, te deprimes, te retiras, conservas energía. Cuando las cosas van bien, te mueves con gran energía. —¿Y

he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That

He thinks that there has been some routine polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually monitoring that kind of thing.

I created opportunities, in case we might need them.

Magnus is ludicrously hyper-masculine in ways that have been bred and trained out of modern-day men and so they have to deprecate his intelligence.

They are very intelligent," she agreed, with a glance toward the window that made it somewhat ambiguous. "Anyway, that's how they—pigs—got domesticated. We have genetic data on many domesticated breeds, of course. Getting data on the Eurasian wild boar is harder, but we have plenty of that too. That's the source material. Where it gets fun is seeing all the combinations that emerge among the several million wild pigs running around Texas.

The real battle was, you know, on the Internet. Social media.

He was a tiny guy, deeply embedded in a leather chair, like a mouse in a baseball mitt.

Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market.

Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms—like me—are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.

What was that about anyway?" Peter demanded. "You could have gotten us killed!

One of the few appealing things about him was that he had figured out that his personality was a problem and, in classic "get it done" style, had hired a coach to make him less of an asshole. She could see that working in his face.

The idea being that even if John's seat were positioned too far forward—limiting his legroom and reducing his level of physical comfort—the mere act of scooting it back a few inches was, by midwestern standards, a gratuitous waste of energy as well as an implicit admission that the scooter was the sort of person who could not handle a little bit of trouble.

So the borders were easy, except along the frontier of the Dutch Republic, where all the lines of circumvallation ran across their path:

Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God

Once in his life, before the war, he had fallen for a girl as quickly as Einstein had for Sonar Taxlaw. That one brief experience with stupid blind love sufficed to make it possible for him to acknowledge its reality and respect its power.

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

Henry, que en aquel momento tenía once años, no había prestado atención al proceso de elevar el imponente cohete hasta su posición vertical porque se distrajo viendo un par de perros callejeros copulando a unos cien metros del punto de lanzamiento. El

And this is—" "L1, by process of elimination," Luisa said drily, and laughed. "You space people love to count down, I know your ways.