Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Edmund Palling was a sensible man. He was, as a matter of fact, one of those Englishmen who was so sensible that he was daft. For as any French-influenced courtier could explain, to insist on everything's being reasonable, in a world that wasn't, was, in itself, unreasonable.

How can you remember shit like that?" Ty asked.

Randy has that moving-through-syrup feeling he gets when enacting some emotionally huge transition in his life.

I've posed this question myself. If the myth of the creator refers to the first single-celled, asexual being, how do we get to SEX?

scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings.

She took a step forward, leaving maybe a quarter of an inch of clearance between her belly and the tip of his boxer-tented doodle.

Gold is the corpse of value

An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive.

I am Death," she said. "Now, which one of us is going to open the gate?

They push through a fire door into another section of the U-Stor-It, which looks the same as the last one (everything looks the same in America, there are no transitions

Jedna z nejdÄ›sivÄ›jÅ¡ích vÄ›cí na skute?ným inÃ…Â¥ouÅ¡ovi pro vÄ›tÅ¡inu lidí není to, že se neumí chovat – protože to zažili vÅ¡ichni – ale spíÅ¡ že se kv?li tomu v?bec necítí hloupÄ›.

He nodded. "When the shutter opened to capture that first perfect image of the eclipse, magic ceased to function across all human societies.

Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.

She slammed the book closed, ran to her bed, gathered her stuffed animals up in her arms, started chewing on her blanket, and cried for a while, considering the question of trolls.

She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.

It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round. "Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction, they're not headed our way anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. "Correction. No boat.

It was no longer necessary to send out dirty yokels in coonskin caps to chart the wilderness, kill the abos, and clear-cut the groves; now all you needed was a hot young geotect, a start matter compiler, and a jumbo Source.

The complications, as always, had to do with avoiding collisions and respecting what was still called "air space" around habitats, even though it had no air in it and might more properly have been called "space space.

They were ushered through the doors and past a range of security checkpoints into the offices of White Label Industries LLC, whose logo was a featureless white rectangle.

Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time.

the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

period of geological cunnilingus.

The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There's no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool's errand.

The world of physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you, for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those men's emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it.