Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Men of the other type—the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent—aren't necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.

You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder—its DNA—xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway

They are probably now either archived or expunged. If I don't escape from 1851 within the next three weeks, I will never know which.

In some ways, the battlefield is more civilized than court," Lian said, somewhat wistfully. "A man's worth is exactly how much glory his actions bring to his general." Her tone hardened. "Here, a man's worth is calculated by what he says and by what others say about him.

In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene's friends), had actually done a lot for Randy's peace of mind over the years.

But it turns out that we are wired for intersubjectivity. Our perception of reality is as much social as it is personal. Why are we disturbed by psychotics? Because they see and hear things we don't, and that's just wrong. Why do prisoners in solitary confinement go nuts? Because they don't have others to confirm their perceptions.

he was a horse-fancier, and so this part of the anecdote was never related without many details concerning this horse's ancestry, which was more distinguished than that of most human beings)

If we get out of this, will you be my girl?

Sarah's entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say "hi" to her.

Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire.

Uh, it's not something I have given much thought to," he says. "Is that what we are about now? Are we going to establish a new currency?" "Well obviously someone needs to establish one that doesn't suck," Avi says. "Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?" Randy asks.

No more than five minutes later, the U-boat goes away. Shaftoe imagines it tumbling end-over-end down the side of the reef, headed for an undersea canyon, scattering gold bars and mercury globules into the black water like fairy dust. Shaftoe's back on the corvette and everyone is pounding him on the back and toasting him. He just wants to find a private place to open up that purple bottle.

When I think of all the things I've worried about and been afraid of in my life—and now it's plain that I've been scared of the wrong things.

Pascal's Wager?" asked Dr. Trinh. "Pascal once said that you should believe in God because, if you turned out to be wrong, you weren't losing anything, and if you turned out to be right, the reward was infinite," Corvallis said.

And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives.

That is a very odd thing to see on the Thames," Daniel remarked. "What flag does she fly?" For van Hoek had unlimbered his prospective-glass. "The double eagle. She is a war-galley of the Russian Navy," van Hoek said. Then, after a moment's pause, he laughed at the absurdity of such a thing.

Well, thank you for making it so clear why I should be miserable," Randy says forbearingly.

But it was a twilight sleep, semiconscious and mindful for a few minutes at a time, until his thoughts would lose coherence and stray into blurry wisps that were to real dreams as cobwebs are to spiderwebs.

That's how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long—they simply say it in Latin. But if we were to unfold their convoluted phrases and translate them into a philosophical language, all of their contradictions and vagueness would become manifest.

Only a few hours later, watching another such column go by, he stared right into the face of Monsieur Arlanc—who stared right back at him. He had no hair, his cheeks were grizzly and sucked-in from hunger, but Monsieur Arlanc it was.

In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story.

The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one's own ability to turn lead into gold. (Enoch in Boston, 1713)

If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself. And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction. But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.

He wondered whether the designers of the phone had performed clinical studies on snoozers in order to decide on the nine-minute interval. Why not eight minutes, or ten? The makers of the phone were famously particular about design. This had to have been data-driven.