Top 500 Neal Stephenson Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “It wasn’t just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A.”

— Neal Stephenson

402. “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

403. “Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses – viruses generated from within itself.”

— Neal Stephenson

404. “I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.”

— Neal Stephenson

405. “What is BFR?” asked Pete Starling. For the graph’s vertical scale was labeled thus. “Bolide Fragmentation Rate,” Doob said. “The rate at which new rocks are being produced.” “Is that a standard term?” Pete wanted to know. His tone was not so much hostile as unnerved. “No,” Doob said, “I made it up. Yesterday. On the plane.” He was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn’t want things to get snarky this early in the meeting.”

— Neal Stephenson

406. “Dr. Harris was now wishing that the late Doc Dubois had never opened his big fat mouth.”

— Neal Stephenson

407. “Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes.”

— Neal Stephenson

408. “Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.”

— Neal Stephenson

409. “Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, “What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible – you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?”

— Neal Stephenson

410. “It’s daytime. A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from the tank farm a mile away, like a time-lapse chrysanthemum. It is so vast and complicated in its blooming, uncontrolled growth that Rife stops halfway up the stairs to watch.”

— Neal Stephenson

411. “The damn bells kept ringing through the fog. Bud mumbled a command to his music system, a phased acoustical array splayed across both eardrums like the seeds on a strawberry. The volume went up but couldn’t scour away the deep tones of the carillon, which.”

— Neal Stephenson

412. “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

413. “Their morning training was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a plainly dressed man. Lugo, the youngest initiate at the chapter house, noticed him first and nearly received a blow to the head as a result of his inattention. Shouting at the rest of the men to stop their drill, Andreas glared at the man who was standing inside the chapter house gate. “How might we assist you?” he called across the yard, more than a little annoyed at the interruption.”

— Neal Stephenson

414. “I’m surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new technology first!”

— Neal Stephenson

415. “That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage-wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once, he had feared that old age would bring senility; now, he was certain it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations.”

— Neal Stephenson

416. “There’s a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be shockingly poor taste until he remembers it’s a German boat.”

— Neal Stephenson

417. “A more down-to-earth project run by the Soviets had determined that eight square meters of algae – an expanse of pond scum about the size of two ping-pong tables – was needed to keep a single human supplied with oxygen.”

— Neal Stephenson

418. “For a fraction of a second he was a yellow blossom of flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it. All that remained of what he’d been was a wisp of steam coiling above the torrent of fire.”

— Neal Stephenson

419. “As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation,” the first MetaCop says. “You stay cool and we’ll stay cool,” the second MetaCop says.”

— Neal Stephenson

420. “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

421. “Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?”

— Neal Stephenson

422. “The place was empty ‘cause of the Hanging. I didn’t want to stay and – ” “And what?” “Get more ahead of the others than I was already.” “If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it – not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school.”

— Neal Stephenson

423. “You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin.”

— Neal Stephenson

424. “Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm.”

— Neal Stephenson

425. “And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.”

— Neal Stephenson

426. “Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals –.”

— Neal Stephenson

427. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

428. “Southern California doesn’t know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.”

— Neal Stephenson

429. “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

430. “Eventually the visitors were treated to a thoroughly non-ironic dinner at an Applebee’s.”

— Neal Stephenson

431. “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

432. “That was his youngest. Hadley, the girl in the middle, was in Berkeley; she’d been doing volunteer work for an organization in Oakland and had a lot of free time.”

— Neal Stephenson

433. “Never been here before. It’s like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they’ve blundered into the mega-jackpot. It’s got everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler would identify with luxury: gold-plated fixtures, lots of injection-molded pseudomarble, velvet drapes, and a butler.”

— Neal Stephenson

434. “The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.”

— Neal Stephenson

435. “No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive.”

— Neal Stephenson

436. “He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they’re scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action.”

— Neal Stephenson

437. “My colleague Bruce Sterling has defined a thriller as a science fiction novel that includes the President of the United States.”

— Neal Stephenson

438. “We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.”

— Neal Stephenson

439. “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.”

— Neal Stephenson

440. “Commuters lining up at the tube stations, waiting to cross the Causeway into Greater Shanghai, seen only as a storm front of neonstained, coal-scented smog that encompassed the horizon.”

— Neal Stephenson

441. “As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs.”

— Neal Stephenson

442. “For like a lot of young Moirans, Kath Two didn’t even try to establish a fixed home. With a home came a social circle, and perhaps a family.”

— Neal Stephenson

443. “Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah’s preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri.”

— Neal Stephenson

444. “The tragedy – and the entire point – of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you.”

— Neal Stephenson

445. “Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.”

— Neal Stephenson

446. “Why would that cause him to pack up his bolt, chord, and sphere, and hurry to Ecba, of all places?”

— Neal Stephenson

447. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that,” Tristan said, and finally sat down again. “It’s the dog that didn’t bark.”

— Neal Stephenson

448. “He did not seem to grasp something that was clear enough to me and Cord: namely, that there were extras who would beat up avout simply because it was more entertaining than not beating them up – not because they subscribed to some ridiculous theory of what we were. He was assuming that rapscallions bothered to have theories.”

— Neal Stephenson

449. “I locked him out of the reticule,” Esma said. “He was speaking incoherently of cheese.”

— Neal Stephenson

450. “One of the soldiers slapped Gansukh on the legs with the shaft of his spear, and the Mongol warrior rolled away from the blow, getting his legs under him. Even though Gansukh didn’t understand a word of what was being said, the message was clear. Clenching his teeth, Gansukh wobbled to his feet, and as he stood upright, one of the other soldiers whacked him across the back, causing him to stumble and nearly fall.”

— Neal Stephenson