Quotes from Neal Stephenson

quale." The subjective experience of (for example) redness. Or of music, or of a tarte tatin.

If you are a professional writer—i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed—emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

in the informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin with.

Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in bed.

Right, by tomorrow morning everyone will have congregated in Le Havre and you can all pile in the car and come back out here together, said Tristan in a rapid monotone, as if needing to rationalize being along with me overnight as nothing more than a matter of logistics. DEAR READER: It was not a matter of logistics.

There is a saying, 'Turtles all the way down,' which I would not expect you to understand, but the point of it is that to speculate along these lines is idle

Punjab, the more certain he became that simple and obvious would defeat complicated and clever

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

Academics being no less nomadic than Congregational preachers, he took work where he could find it. He became a Professor of Greek and Latin at

Because in the name of Our Lord's mammy, if I could be someplace where money's got no religion and religion's got no money, I'd be a happier woman.

as normally solved by engineers, would require any number of perfectly reasonable but aesthetically displeasing approximations. Lawrence's solution would provide exact results.

Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you look up the numbers you want.

It was a great day and age to be a retired but still healthy mechanic with no family to distract him.

But America's like this big old clanking, smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. Leaves behind a trail of garbage a mile wide. Always needs more fuel.

the same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom.

It's daytime. A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from the tank farm a mile away, like a time- lapse chrysanthemum. It is so vast and complicated in its blooming, uncontrolled growth that Rife stops halfway up the stairs to watch.

He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to mathematics, but didn't. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that mathematics, like pipe-organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one needed some way to put bread on the table.

Your horse whickers because he likes your manner," Feronantus said. "He is coming to trust you. Horses are naive that way. Of all the savagery of war, I regret the disappointment and agony of the horses most of all.

He remained in engineering and did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year

she knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations.

hydrological warfare.

I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make.

The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream.

He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of new theorems in the field of information theory.