Quotes from Neal Stephenson

As you probably know, the Vikings invaded France, were bought off with Normandy, settled there, then used it as a base for invading Britain and many other places. The most bad-ass Normans crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror; the ones that stayed behind in Normandy spawned the generations who mostly enjoyed jousting and courtly love, etc. . .

It would be unseemly for me to beg for your succour so early in this letter, and so I shall divert you (or so I flatter myself) by relating my last conversation with my employer, Peter Romanov, or Peter the Great, as he is now styled—not without perfectly sound reasons—by many (I say "employer" because he owes—I do not say "pays"—me a stipend to act as his advisor on certain matters; my Mistress and liege-lady remains, as always, Sophie). As

But the only feature of the view that ever changed was the signatures of foam deposited on the beach by the waves. Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own runup onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start, but each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of grey foam and got buried underneath the next.

added. Apparently a mere two-cab caravan was not enough to trigger Ariane's anxieties, and so the one carrying

It's not about energy and skill," Rufus said. "It's about finding a fit. Where does ol' Rufus fit? Not many places.

Henry, riding shotgun, made a touching effort to stay awake and then fell into slumber. Henry was a sweet kid and Doob knew that when he woke up he would apologize. But Henry wasn't a parent, and he didn't understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.

Death itself was always quick, Raphael reflected, staring off at the distant horizon. It is the survivors who feel pain the longest.

But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: he's broke and unemployed.

But possession of this psychological high ground is different from a monopoly in any normal sense of that word, because here the dominance has nothing to do with technical performance or price. The old robber-baron monopolies were monopolies because they physically controlled means of production and/or distribution. But in the software business, the means of production is hackers typing code, and the means of distribution is the Internet, and no one is claiming that Microsoft controls those.

He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history—in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God's sake—two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this?

Then — moving as fast as a man could over wet slick tree-roots with one chicken-neck clenched in each fist —

I remember the Pharisees from Jesus Christ, Superstar. They were the ones with the deep voices who were always hassling Christ.

This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war.

the scheduled launch, he had flown to Baikonur, bringing

one (everything looks the same in America, there are no transitions now).

Battle changed men; that was part of why Francis preached so strenuously for nonviolent resolutions to conflict. Fighting your fellow man was bestial behavior—worse than beasts, in fact, for no wolf or bear assaulted kin for the specious reasons many nobleman and king clung to as their rationale for going to war.

But most of them must have the wit to understand that phenomena like these are maddeningly unstable, and that there's no telling what weird, seemingly inconsequential event might cause the system to shift into a radically different configuration.

summary to me. I thought you couldn't summarize.

his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.

desperate run for help to save the remnant of his failed

The Nipponese say they're the only people who were ever nuked. But every nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test their weapons. In America, they nuked the Aleutians. Amchitka.

It is surprisingly easy—but then, really stupid decisions are always the easiest.

Though some efforts had been made to camouflage their essential nature, they were really just guns for shooting humans, albeit humans strapped into comfortable, pressurized bullets.

that's how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn't bother with, which means that there's probably no reason for it; you never know what they're doing or why.