Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he’s looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view he’s looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.”

— Neal Stephenson

252. “I am what I am,” Ty said. “And what is that?” Ariane asked. “A bartender. Always happy to make new acquaintances.” He nodded at Bard. “Or to provide guests with drinks. Anyone thirsty?”

— Neal Stephenson

253. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

254. “Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we’d never been born.”

— Neal Stephenson

255. “We’re like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.”

— Neal Stephenson

256. “Zipper the Fatlanders called it. Cock-catcher it was to Hunfast, the hapless.”

— Neal Stephenson

257. “Maybe we should go back and get their guns,” Marlon suggested. “That’s how it would work in a video game,” Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing.”

— Neal Stephenson

258. “The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have thought up the naked mole rat.”

— Neal Stephenson

259. “They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.”

— Neal Stephenson

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor.”

— Neal Stephenson

264. “SF does possess at least two of the classic markers of genrehood, namely intellectual disreputability and moral salaciousness. SF thrives because it is idea porn.”

— Neal Stephenson

265. “Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

267. “The expenditure of paper and printer ink had been somewhat lavish. Two generations from now, if any humans survived, they would look on this heap of documents with some combination of disgust and amazement. Because paper was going to be scarce by then, and they would view its use for such purposes in roughly the same way as Americans of the twenty-first century had viewed the use of sperm whale oil to fuel streetlamps.”

— Neal Stephenson

268. “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

269. “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

270. “It was a smart cane. When he grabbed the handlebars it would help him stand up. It would then steady his locomotion even on the roughest terrain, adding its six legs to his two.”

— Neal Stephenson

271. “The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.”

— Neal Stephenson

272. “We can’t run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don’t exist, we find meaning in randomness.”

— Neal Stephenson

273. “Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed.”

— Neal Stephenson

274. “Donald Cameron has his own character in the world now!?” Skeletor exclaimed, in somewhat the same tone of voice as a tribune might have said, Hannibal has crossed the Alps with elephants!?”

— Neal Stephenson

275. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

276. “This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.”

— Neal Stephenson

277. “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

278. “The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however – for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”

— Neal Stephenson

279. “Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.”

— Neal Stephenson

280. “He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance.”

— Neal Stephenson

281. “The roads shed lanes, then insensibly narrowed, grew rougher and more tortuous, until without having noticed any sudden transitions we found ourselves driving on endless one-lane tracks and stopping to avoid flocks of livestock so tough and emaciated they looked like jerky on the hoof.”

— 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. “This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns.”

— Neal Stephenson

284. “Einstein followed her as if his eyes were connected to her butt cheeks with fishhooks.”

— Neal Stephenson

285. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

286. “His real job – the job that the Owners paid him for – was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls.”

— Neal Stephenson

287. “No, rebellion is what the Duke of Monmouth did, it is a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it.”

— Neal Stephenson

288. “Yur heaved a sigh, then continued in a more moderate tone: “Never mind. I see it now. It’s some kind of Purpose thing. Above my pay grade. You should have just told me.” He drew himself up and saluted. “What are my orders, sir?”

— Neal Stephenson

289. “A long fall. Dinah had ceased to even think in terms of up and down. The concept of falling had become meaningless to her.”

— Neal Stephenson

290. “Now there are many Shaftoes – mostly in Tennessee – but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler.”

— Neal Stephenson

291. “Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals –.”

— Neal Stephenson

292. “The West-march of the Walmart Held all the food in the world, Bottled beer by the boatload, Frost-kept food, milk and meat. Setting up for a siege behind barricades The Norsemen fetched food, collected clothing, Turkish trousers with flies in the front Kept closed with clever contraptions, Tiny.”

— Neal Stephenson

293. “Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules.”

— Neal Stephenson

294. “Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction – the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.”

— Neal Stephenson

295. “Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, “If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else.” “Whereas women can’t?” “I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I’m characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier.” “Hmmmm.”

— Neal Stephenson

296. “The Police Minister’s toilet chided him.”

— Neal Stephenson

297. “As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.”

— Neal Stephenson

298. “Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This.”

— Neal Stephenson

299. “One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.”

— Neal Stephenson

300. “Moira wished she spoke better Russian so that she could talk to Tekla about her ideas regarding appearance and grooming. The facial scars put her well outside the norms of feminine beauty and she had doubled down by electing to keep the buzz cut. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she was, to put it bluntly, kind of hot. Moira hated to say it. But hotness was a part of the human condition and it was pointless to pretend that it did not exist.”

— Neal Stephenson