Quotes About Imagination

Why do they believe that?" "Because we are hackers," Csongor said, "and they have seen movies.

Your ability to have empathy with the Geometer—to imagine what it would be like to be someone else—isn't a mere courtesy. It is an innate process of consciousness.

Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.

a scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings

THE PREMISE OF THIS BOOK CAME TO ME CIRCA 2006

A gazebo on top of a welding rig" was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here.

In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.

Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore. Right

Books are the single most efficient technology there is in terms of nimbleness and bang for the buck. You can present a whole universe in a book. It's produced simply by sitting in front of a typewriter or a computer and tapping on keys. There's no real limit to what you can conjure up in the reader's imagination by doing that. The book is irreplaceable.

Hmmm.... supposing is a dangerous practice

Downtown is before them, as high and bright as the aurora borealis rising from the black water of the Bering Sea.

People who like math. So I was trying to imagine—" "When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?" "Yes.

The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.

As soon as you open the door wide enough to admit pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, you have let in all of those other possibilities as well.

What's an adventure?" Nell said. The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with

In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability to create a whole world, as big and variegated as the one that he and the Magistrate lived in. But if this was true of the Innocent, it was true of the Condemned Man as well, and so he should not—no one should ever—be put to death.

Neal Stephenson

So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself—and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Gedankenexperiment

Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches—and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment

Neal Stephenson

You know what, though? It's all entertainment. Real or made up. It's stuff that people watch on screens or varps. Red gets that.

nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.