Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Seeing what had happened to Memmie, he had suffered a stroke that had immediately rendered him aphasic. Swelling of the brain killed him an hour later. The Diggers buried him and Memmie together in the place where they had fallen.

Actually, they have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate;

some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic.

That's the thing about space," she said. "So many smart people are so interested in it that it's difficult to come up with a really new idea.

vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.

I have come to the conclusion that the true benefit of religion is not to make people virtuous, which is impossible, but to put a sort of bridle on the worst excesses of their viciousness.

Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access

In the future, any DOer actions of this nature are to be downplayed to the greatest extent possible that is consistent with accurate record-keeping. This is not a Nora Roberts novel.

handing the briefcase over to a computer guy. Y.T. knows he's a computer guy because he has long hair in a ponytail and he's wearing jeans and he seems gentle.

Ivy was the only person awake, her face lit up by her screen. And for the first time in a long time, it looked the way it had used to when she'd been on the track of some fascinating science problem: alive, intent, fiercely joyful.

All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us. Now, religion used to be essentially viral—a piece of information that replicated inside the human mind, jumping from one person to the next.

Let me tell you a couple of things while we're walking. By the time we get to the café, if you think I'm a creep or a nutcase, just tell me, and I'll simply buy you a coffee and be on my way. But if you don't think I'm a creep or a nutcase, then we're going to have a very serious conversation that could take hours. Do you have dinner plans?

We don't believe in anything as simple as metempsychosis—the movement of an individual soul from one body to another. That's not what we mean by reincarnation at all." "What

One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

He could have kept his money in The Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went public, but his mother would have been a street person. So when his mother visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro views that as his personal fortune. It won't pay the rent, but that's okay—when you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.

if any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan, whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a neater job of it than the Fascists will.

Well, it's all math," he says. "If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the whole point of math.

It was black, the proper color for domestic terrorism during the evening hours

The best we can do is to be good at something, or a few things. We come home tired, and we feel the need to veg out—a recent coinage, meaning to drop voluntarily into a kind of vegetative coma, typically in front of the TV. I should know; in my family, I am infamous for my lowbrow tastes in entertainment, my sluggishness to attend art films and theatrical productions.

She had no time for woke Westerners who wanted to decolonize everything.

Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In

The vehicle weighed something like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a silo full of Swiss watches.

hot and pulsing on the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of an old man about to have his first orgasm in years. He

Ymir," Luisa said, pronouncing it as she'd heard Sean do: ee-meer. A word from Norse mythology referring to primordial ice giants. Sean's code name for a particular hunk of ice that his project had identified, and that he meant to bring back. "Yeah.