Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Then he walked home and died.

Life's rich pageant. And all that," Randy says.

Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent.

economy-minded three-ringers who have just shelled out a million yen for a Narcolombia license and who need some real estate, any real estate, that they can throw a fence around and extraterritorialize.

Arjuna asteroid.

Narcolombia, just about everything is a capital offense

They take seats across the head end of the table, which is wide enough for a Last Supper tableau. In the Jesus position is a really big chair. It is the kind of thing you'd get if you went to a Finnish designer with a shaved head, rimless glasses, and twin Ph.D.s in semiotics and civil engineering, wrote him a blank check, and asked him to design a throne.

Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt—you target them because they're the officers, right?" "No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?

Luisa had a relaxed self-confidence that made it easy for her to admit that she knew absolutely nothing about such topics as orbital mechanics. But it was more than just that; she knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger's end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.

a combinatorial explosion of name cards and introductions...

Half an hour later I pronounced us lost. Jesry accepted it with pleasure, as if this were more satisfactory than being found.

They can't tell what she's thinking. But they can tell that something's going on in her brain, that she's using parts of her brain right now that she didn't use when they were asking the nonsense questions.

The universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organized anomalies.

For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack

As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams.

The reversion of Windows to a CLI when it was in distress proved to Mac partisans that Windows was nothing more than a cheap facade, like a garish afghan flung over a rotted-out sofa.

He doesn't even know what a scupper is, except a modality of vomiting.

What the fuck do you want? Y.T., I'm sorry about this. But something's going on. Something big time. I'm keeping one eye on a big biker named Raven. The problem with you hackers is you never stop working. That's what a hacker is, Hiro says.

Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment.

But the ability (at least in theory) of computers to perform the calculations needed to generate three-dimensional graphics suggested a future in which immersive audiovisual experiences might become possible.

people with hopes were apt to become profligate in spending resources and taking risks. Which

she was the epitome of a particular New England Congregationalist bloodline that manages to simultaneously suggest cool, contained patrician and indefatigable peasant stock.

No intelligent person in Blue believes that, of course.

As it happened, what actually brought the cost of graphics hardware down was videogames—in particular Doom, which came out the year after Snow Crash was published.