Quotes from Neal Stephenson

since they don't make a lot of money or get a lot of respect, you have to prove you're personally committed and that you don't care about those trappings.

And, Randy's favorite, As to luck, there is the old miners' proverb: "Gold is where you find it.

Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. The more you use it—the more viruses you get exposed to—the better your immune system becomes.

Whole sections had been taken over by the King's pack of semi-feral spaniels, who'd become inbred even by Royal standards and thus hare-brained even by Spaniel standards.

other people's perfume sticks with you like a bladder infection.

The snow moved a little and gave me a void in front of my face - air for a moment. Most importantly it kept me from panicking, and let me open my eyes. There was a dim blue-grey light. I could hear Arsibalt saying Just enough to read by! and Lio answering If only you'd thought to bring a book.

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.

Much later, humans might rouse themselves to take action and be agents once again. But now and for long into the future they would be nothing more than patients.

Any number that can be created by fetishistically multiplying 2s by each other, and subtracting the occasional 1, will be instantly recognizable to a hacker.

Condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?

At one point, some years previously, one of the engineers at Corporation 9592—a classic liberal-arts-major-turned-coder-so-he-could-make-a-decent-living—had identified this as the Hand met Spiegelende Bol Problem

Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds.

When the climate had been warmer, civilizations had sloshed back and forth across this glacier-planed landscape for a couple of thousand years like silt in a miner's pan, forming drifts of built-up stuff that stayed long after the people had departed. At any given moment during those millennia, a billion might have lived on this territory that now supported a few tens of thousands.

The grove in the temperate rain forest," it said, or as near as a crow could come to pronouncing those words, and then beat air and took off, rising toward the rafters but then banking hard down the slanted tube that would take it back into the transit.

Most people, on listening to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the damaged brain.

She got lost then in the striations in the iris of Edda's left eye. These were immensely complex, and of all colors, having about them the same balance of order and wildness as exposed tree roots, tendrils of smoke in the wind, tongues of wild flame, the swirling of water where rivers came together.

The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire.

Wolf-Rayet stars

Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth," T.R. said, "it wouldn't undo what we've done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.

Information Theory would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid dynamics would inform the hull of a ship.

Classified," he said. "Never heard of him. Perhaps a Cornish name, is it? Protestant or Catholic?" "'Tisn't a name," he said. "It means I cannot tell you. I am under orders not to tell you.

You have an agreeably uninteresting existence. Let's see if we can change that.

I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by 'Half-Cocked' Jack Shaftoe, L'Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!