Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Coals gleamed in the hearth and the air was fragrant with pine branches, frankincense, and lapsang souchong tea. It was New Year's Day.

What then is the criterion that the mind uses to select an infinitesimal minority of possible outcomes to worry about?

But it is quite obviously a matter of male jealousy. 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.

His own professional journey, since then, could be seen as the single-minded pursuit of weird stuff, and the shedding, at every opportunity, of all responsibilities that didn't qualify as such.

I'll set up a cron job to do it right now," Corvallis said. "Once an hour?" "I was thinking once a minute.

You are all welcome at the Crow's Nest." Ty looked over at Deep. "Just go easy on the cold baths, man. The plumbing in that place has seen better days, and I'm the only one who knows how to fix it.

Sline: 1. In Fluccish of the late Praxic age and early Reconstitution, a slang word formed by truncation of 'baseline,'which is a Praxic commercial bulshytt term. It appears to be a noun that turned into an adjective, meaning common or widely shared. 2. A noun denoting an extramuros person with no special education, skills, aspirations, or hope of acquiring same. 3. Derogatory term for a stupid or uncouth person, especially one who takes pride in those very qualities.

he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

Once the characteristic numbers of most notions are determined, the human race will have a new kind of tool, a tool that will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses helped our eyes, a tool that will be as far superior to microscopes or telescopes as reason is to vision. —LEIBNIZ, Philosophical Essays, TRANS. BY ARLEW AND GARBER

The Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana had made much use of the definite article—the Town, the Castle, the Hotel, the Pub, the Pier. Waterhouse stops in at the Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up the Street

If a want of hope made men desperate, a surfeit of it made them stupid in a wholly other way. Hope was tricky business, it seemed, and ought to be managed by someone with more experience of it than Daniel.

Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort. The first and most important mental habit that people develop when they learn how to write computer programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To make their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking large problems down into small subroutines that can be used over and over again in different contexts.

But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every

We gotta terraform Earth before we get distracted by Mars

He woke up his phone. Its home screen was chickenpoxed with little red dots with accusatory numbers in them

Leibniz is proposing a strange inversion of what we normally mean when we describe a man as distinguished, or unique. Normally when we say these things, we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man's uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity—to distinguish one thing from another more effectively than ordinary souls." Roger

One sort of glib explanation I heard once was that Rhetors could change the past, and were glad to do it, but Incanters could change the future—and were reluctant.

Sometimes there was no gap between joke and real.

children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows, all warm and fuzzy in their Li'l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas, which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time.

A great warrior must always search for the enemy's intentions and guard his own.

The end state of all this would be a Dyson sphere:

Anyway, she was now the sort of girl who shot people. Useful to know.

What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.

Significant glances began flying around the restaurant, like semaphores before a naval engagement.