Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “And she went on in this vein for a minute or two; she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes.”

— Neal Stephenson

352. “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

353. “Leibniz’s most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.”

— Neal Stephenson

354. “An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.”

— Neal Stephenson

355. “The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers – It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments – Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.”

— Neal Stephenson

356. “He was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.”

— Neal Stephenson

357. “She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating her way toward the sweet ’crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark velocity.”

— Neal Stephenson

358. “But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.”

— Neal Stephenson

359. “GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.”

— Neal Stephenson

360. “Fearless for oneself, fear for others – that must be what it means to be a hero.”

— Neal Stephenson

361. “The modern world’s hell on haiku writers: “Electrical generator” is, what, eight syllables? You couldn’t even fit that onto the second line!”

— Neal Stephenson

362. “Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.”

— Neal Stephenson

363. “They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword.”

— Neal Stephenson

364. “The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared.”

— Neal Stephenson

365. “He was forty-seven years old but in dim light could have passed for thirty.”

— Neal Stephenson

366. “The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue – records that tell a consistent story.”

— Neal Stephenson

367. “It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.”

— Neal Stephenson

368. “They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman’s March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping.”

— Neal Stephenson

369. “Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.”

— Neal Stephenson

370. “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

371. “People are my books,” Ty said. “But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.”

— Neal Stephenson

372. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

373. “Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual?”

— Neal Stephenson

374. “Most of the people around the entrance were, of course, bellhops and taxi drivers. Guests went in and out. Some were dressed in business suits, others in casual tourist attire. He did not see any commandos in tracksuits.”

— Neal Stephenson

375. “His rule of thumb, after a walk, is to drink water until he begins to urinate again. Then he can consider other activities.”

— Neal Stephenson

376. “Edzard screamed at the men on the starboard side, threatening to throw them overboard if they didn’t match the pace of the port team.”

— Neal Stephenson

377. “They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.”

— Neal Stephenson

378. “I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?”

— Neal Stephenson

379. “I know,” Julia said. “It is so difficult rebuilding an intelligence community from scratch. One must make do with the materials at hand. Their youth, their inexperience, and the openness they’ve come to expect from living their whole lives on the Internet – all are inimical to doing things as they ought to be done. That is why we need more experienced hands – people who have learned the right instincts.”

— Neal Stephenson

380. “It wasn’t only the Lorites who said that is not a new result. People re-invented the wheel all the time. There was nothing shameful in it. If the rest of us oohed and aahed and said, “Gosh, a wheel, no one’s ever thought of that before,” just to make that person feel good, nothing would ever get done.”

— Neal Stephenson

381. “The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial.”

— Neal Stephenson

382. “One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don’t know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.”

— Neal Stephenson

383. “It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like “complicated.”

— Neal Stephenson

384. “The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.”

— Neal Stephenson

385. “Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.”

— Neal Stephenson

386. “Maybe that’s what a leader is, Dinah. The one person who can’t – who shouldn’t – share her problems with anyone else.”

— Neal Stephenson

387. “All of Rommel’s supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west.”

— Neal Stephenson

388. “Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo.”

— Neal Stephenson

389. “It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.”

— Neal Stephenson

390. “How could a man become a god?” Nell asked. “By living in an extremely pragmatic society,” said Constable Moore after some thought.”

— Neal Stephenson

391. “It is what you don’t expect... that most needs looking for.”

— Neal Stephenson

392. “When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.”

— Neal Stephenson

393. “What destroys it? Is it the Inquisition? Those idiot priests go chasing after innocent women, as if real witches would let themselves be caught and tortured and killed! Almost by definition, anyone who is caught and tortured, and doesn’t free themselves by magic, has no magic powers.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

395. “It would be easier,” Doob said, “if I could figure out what the hell she wanted.” “You’re assuming,” Luisa said, “that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.”

— Neal Stephenson

396. “A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science.”

— Neal Stephenson

397. “An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.”

— Neal Stephenson

398. “To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude.”

— Neal Stephenson

399. “The temptation to cocoon in a microhotel pod on the slab, to eat hot noodles from a cup and watch videos, was strong.”

— Neal Stephenson

400. “I doubt you even know what duty is,” she retorted. A risky response – such flippancy of the tongue – and it might provoke them, but showing fear would invite a response. Half of combat is causing your opponent to think you are stronger than you are, Gansukh had told her. Scarface.”

— Neal Stephenson