Quotes from Neal Stephenson

That's the bad news." "Okay, and what is the good news?" "All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days," she said, deadpan.

it was more likely that they would lose consciousness from the gee forces first—a relatively painless way to go.

encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri

The Rat Thing has them now," Hiro says.

But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs only in 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.

Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he'd plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone.

Daniel got dressed. Much of his clothing had been blown up.

Get this one a copy of the Cryptonomicon. And a desk—as close to the coffee machine as possible. And why don't you promote the son of a bitch as long as you're at it.

Where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruin.

IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT— This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL. My basic advice: DON'T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.

All the potential emperors are assholes, and they're all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So

a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus.

The barriers placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon, breaking the Nipponese Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking the Coral naval attache machine cipher, breaking Unnamed Nipponese Army Water Transport Code 3A, breaking the Greater East Asia Ministry Code) present about as much resistance as successive decks of a worm-eaten wooden frigate.

Hackworth was alone and separate from all humanity, a feeling he had grown up with, like a childhood friend living next door.

He can control these people by grafting radio receivers into their skulls, broadcasting instructions—me—directly into their brainstems.

There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.

Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning's sake—which was how it ought to be.

we are what meteors, comets, sunspots are to astronomers: monstrous deviations, fell portents of undesired change, proof that something is wrong in a system that was supposedly framed by the hand of God.

He has found that he works best when he is not horny, which is to say in the day or so following ejaculation.

We are technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn't always line up with what people imagine they want.

Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them—that's what computers are for.

None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts.

She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.

No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office to even register on her eyeballs and take up valuable memory space in her brain. Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer my carpet on the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic shit. Chicks with lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures.