Neal Stephenson Quotes
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251. “He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it.”

— Neal Stephenson

252. “She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed – not a polite ‘atchoo’ but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action.”

— Neal Stephenson

253. “Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone’s half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you’re sunk.”

— Neal Stephenson

254. “No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,” Dr. Waterhouse reminds him.”

— Neal Stephenson

255. “Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it.”

— Neal Stephenson

256. “Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds.”

— Neal Stephenson

257. “Far to the east, just above the horizon, was an especially big dot of light, like the clasp on a necklace. That would be the colossal structure of the Eye, currently stationed above the Atlantic.”

— Neal Stephenson

258. “I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness.”

— Neal Stephenson

259. “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work.”

— Neal Stephenson

260. “If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time.”

— Neal Stephenson

261. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

262. “The little boy in him was crestfallen that he wasn’t going on the adventure. Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable.”

— Neal Stephenson

263. “It’s when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain – sometimes illusory gain – that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.”

— Neal Stephenson

264. “Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he’d picked the right city for it.”

— Neal Stephenson

265. “The Fourth Crusade was an epic clusterfuck a comic-opera misadventure a tragic saga with farcical elements.”

— Neal Stephenson

266. “All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units.”

— Neal Stephenson

267. “The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores.”

— Neal Stephenson

268. “Gratitude and obedience. At The Frogs, the relationship between a knight and the people was clearly understood.”

— Neal Stephenson

269. “That sounds like bulshytt!”

— Neal Stephenson

270. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

— Neal Stephenson

271. “All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s why we can’t do anything else when we’re sleeping: it’s when we work hardest.”

— Neal Stephenson

272. “But the television news cameras couldn’t get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew.”

— Neal Stephenson

273. “Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.”

— Neal Stephenson

274. “Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder’s torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence.”

— Neal Stephenson

275. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.”

— Neal Stephenson

276. “Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.”

— Neal Stephenson

277. “Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li’s situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft’s state-of-the-art hellhounds.”

— Neal Stephenson

278. “It’s – my God – like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.”

— Neal Stephenson

279. “Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that’s closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it’s obvious at a glance who’s on the ball in this office and who is – as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms – having problems.”

— Neal Stephenson

280. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

281. “The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambigous or even contradictory situations – in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.”

— Neal Stephenson

282. “Judge Fang got to eat this way only when someone really important was trying to taint him, and though he had never knowingly allowed his judicial judgment to be swayed, he did enjoy the chow.”

— Neal Stephenson

283. “Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors.”

— Neal Stephenson

284. “I was going to kill that doctor when he shoved his finger up my ass but then I realized the possibilities of that substance.”

— Neal Stephenson

285. “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”

— Neal Stephenson

286. “His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.”

— Neal Stephenson

287. “People who claim they are motivated by the Purpose end up behaving differently – and generally better – than people who serve other masters.” “So it is like believing in God.” “Maybe yes. But without the theology, the scripture, the pigheaded certainty.”

— Neal Stephenson

288. “In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.”

— Neal Stephenson

289. “Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.”

— Neal Stephenson

290. “Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties.”

— Neal Stephenson

291. “But then, Cap’n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard -to-pin-down striated pillow formation.”

— Neal Stephenson

292. “Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.”

— Neal Stephenson

293. “The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.”

— Neal Stephenson

294. “That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?” “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

— Neal Stephenson

295. “Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. That’s what a brain is. That’s what it is to be conscious.”

— Neal Stephenson

296. “Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not hackers.”

— Neal Stephenson

297. “Just because the Panjandrums know how to run cheeseburg stands, they think they know how to run a Convox.”

— Neal Stephenson

298. “I guessed that by pretending to be the leader I could make a few things go my way, at least for a little while, until they figured out I was faking it.”

— Neal Stephenson

299. “Mammon led them on, Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold, Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d In vision beatific; by him first Men also, and by his suggestion taught, Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth For Treasures better hid. – MILTON, Paradise Lost.”

— Neal Stephenson

300. “Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together – that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them.”

— Neal Stephenson