Quotes from Neal Stephenson

if you found yourself on the wrong side of that exponential equation, you were completely screwed.

What's it like working for Mr. Freeze?" "I was going to say the Penguin," Dinah said, "but people in Seattle don't carry umbrellas.

Boys, he said, only want to know two things: who is in charge, and what are the rules.

Das Messer sitzt mir an der Kehle. The knife is at my throat; I am face-to-face with doom.

Jake's opinion is based on a theology I do not agree with. But like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative.

and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise

charge blindly across the emotional minefield and get down as soon as possible to geeking out

So say we all," she said.

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

unbidden and unwanted thoughts are the hardest to expel from one's mind.

which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their "superpower" isn't imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality.

Root is my last name.

The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over.

Actually wrangling eagles was not a thing that he was ever going to learn. It was a whole world of fussy veterinary procedures, weird social man/bird interaction, and messing around with small dead raw animals that did not appeal to him and that he never would have become good at.

Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation

It seemed to Dinah that Camila wanted to strip humanity of its heroes. She'd couched what she'd said in terms of aggression. But by doing so, Camila was just being aggressive in a different way—a passive-aggressive way that Dinah, raised as she'd been raised, couldn't help seeing as sneaky. More destructive, in the end, than the overt kind of aggression.

THREE DAYS NORTH of the Danube, the road focused to a rut in a crowd of scrawny trees that were striving to rise clear from a haze of grasping weeds.

He's rich, Jack muttered to Eliza, or connected with rich persons. Yes—the clothes, the coins ... All fakeable. How do you know him to be rich, then? In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games. (Jack Shaftoe and Eliza)

How can you be a Christian without believing in that?" "I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?

Rome entirely. The dumb beast already sensed his fear and didn't know what to do except be frightened as well. Run, Ferenc

When he came to his senses, he was aware that a large number of telephones were singing their little electronic songs. Including his. The birth cry of a new age. IVY

techniques. That combined with subject's intense curiosity and drive to escape what she sees as the stifling confines of a traditional medieval Jewish household led to her devising the plan that led to her materializing in ODEC #3.

This was the moment when a human would have apologized for having ruined the dinner party, but one of the liberties that went along with being a raven was never being sorry for anything.

Now we're back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.