Quotes from Neal Stephenson

the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians.

Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop.

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.

And she knew that this one thing—the urge to boast of one's accomplishments—had betrayed more secrets and destroyed more careers than anything else.

It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black.

Every fifth link in the Chain was public property. These tended to be parks, though some served as cultural facilities. So you were never more than two links away from green, or at least open, space. The other 576 links were privately owned, and constituted a commercial and residential real estate market that would have been easily recognizable to any pre-Zero property magnate.

Next was a castle divided into many small rooms, with a system for passing messages between rooms through a pneumatic tube. In each room was a group of people who responded to the messages by following certain rules laid out in books, which usually entailed sending more messages to other rooms. After

He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about mathematics.

Religion is not for simpletons.

the American obsession with putting ice cubes into everything.

Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls. Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting.

He gazes up at the ceiling of the chapel through half-closed eyes and thanks God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy rolled into one adorable package.

How does a poor country defeat rich ones?" "Indeed, the answer is not by acquiring wealth in the sense that France has it." "Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows?" "But rather to play a sort of trick and redefine wealth to mean something novel." "Currency!" "Indeed.

Wiener dog underwent explosive decompression, scared a baby.

My plan," said Egdod, "is still unfolding. Pent up for so long in the Fastness, I have learned patience. It is a faculty you have lost, ruling the Land from your high Palace where all things come quickly, and you confuse delay with failure.

Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other.

Plane-change maneuvers are expensive.

what he's really thinking is: why did I waste all those years in academia when I could have been doing great shit like this?

Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same. There may be something happening along the border of the crowd, back where the lights fade into the shade of the overpass.

Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous.

They could not see what they could not imagine

Medical research conducted during the Iraq War has confirmed that immediate administration of morphine following a traumatic event can prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

We see clear evidence that this point, and this point, must be very close to each other—perhaps, directly adjacent—because they seem to have a lot to do with each other; when one lights up, the other tends to light up at the same time, or a little before or after. So we can begin to make sense of this overall pattern of traffic as if it were a three-dimensional