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

— Neal Stephenson

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “Through the uneven morning mist, she could make out the ruin of the monastery on the northern verge. The broken, roofless walls of outbuildings stretched south of the main ruins in a broken curve. Birches and a few young oaks had grown up where monks had likely once raised vegetables. The rest of the clearing was filled with grass and brambles cut through with newly blazed paths. Four lean-tos had been erected just beyond the stone fence of an overgrown graveyard.”

— Neal Stephenson

407. “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

408. “Occasionally a red taxi or Mercedes-Benz would squeeze by along the iron fence and burst free, the driver holding down the horn button so furiously that he might detonate the air bag.”

— Neal Stephenson

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

412. “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

413. “It became sort of obvious that one of them was the boss. Tall guy, a little older than the others, in a Manu jersey.” “Manu jersey?” “Manu Ginobili,” Peter said, almost angry that Zula did not understand the reference. “He plays for the Spurs.”

— Neal Stephenson

414. “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

415. “The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.”

— Neal Stephenson

416. “It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

418. “The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.”

— Neal Stephenson

419. “There was silence around the big table in the Banana.”

— Neal Stephenson

420. “He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and out labia and inner labia... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.”

— Neal Stephenson

426. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Neal Stephenson

432. “Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel’s eye to comprehend – he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible – but.”

— Neal Stephenson

433. “Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals –.”

— Neal Stephenson

434. “Markus’s mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: “Is the president nuking people again?”

— Neal Stephenson

435. “The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got.”

— Neal Stephenson

436. “The question is, how long does Mr. Spinny have to live? And what does that tell us?”

— Neal Stephenson

437. “But in the time-honored manner of most human males, he allowed his eyeballs to swivel her way so that he could check her out, then turned his head so that he could check her out better.”

— Neal Stephenson

438. “The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.”

— Neal Stephenson

439. “What are you doing?” Dengo would ask him. “Observing,” father would say. “But how long can you observe the same thing?” “Forever.”

— Neal Stephenson

440. “It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.”

— Neal Stephenson

441. “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

442. “The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I.”

— Neal Stephenson

443. “I think I’m in love,” she said. He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up.”

— Neal Stephenson

444. “Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.”

— Neal Stephenson

445. “Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.”

— Neal Stephenson

446. “When you say ‘plugged it in,’ could you please tell me everything you plugged into it?” Peter had now dropped, improbably, into a polite, clinical mode, like a customer service rep in a Bangalore cubicle farm.”

— Neal Stephenson

447. “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

448. “She had stayed inside so that she could watch it on the TV in the room, let him know how it had looked on video, how the commentators and pundits had framed it. It.”

— Neal Stephenson

449. “It’s just like the reviews promised – other people’s ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me.”

— Neal Stephenson

450. “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