Quotes from Neal Stephenson

Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here," he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

There are always fuckups, and there is always a goat. Sometimes the goat is you.

The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.

That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see," Orolo told me. "Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.

But what little I'd heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.

The same thrust, pushing against a greatly reduced burden, would then yield acceleration that Lio had cheerfully described as 'near-fatal.' 'But it's okay,' he'd said, 'you'll black out before anything really bad happens to you.

Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old banknotes in the Smithsonian. 'First National Bank of South Bumfuck will remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,' or whatever. That had to stop because commerce became nonlocal—you needed to be able to take your money with you when you went out West, or whatever. But if we're online, the whole world is local, Randy says.

I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.

there is no honour among consultants.

The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money. I hadn't known that, I said. I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there. There might as well be, Arsibalt said, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.

The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world. And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.

It gave them something to do and it took their mind off the way Yuxia was driving, which, had they paid attention to it, might have been the most frightening thing they had seen all day.

One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'.

He was tempted to park the SUV illegally, since, according to his calculations, the authorities were not likely to catch up with him and demand payment of the parking ticket before the end of the world, but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise.

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.

What, not coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding's scrotum?

Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses.

I made it into Wikipedia," sang Erszebet. "I'll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.

Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.

The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest.

Daniel understood the complaint. For Daniel, too, had once designed a building, and savored the thrill of seeing it built, only to endure the long indignity of watching the owner clutter it up with knick-knacks and furniture.