Neal Stephenson

“[...] people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.”

“Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured the process of being ritually goosed by the Government. He feels a strong impulse to drive straight to the nearest gun store and spend about ten thousand dollars. Not that he wants to hurt anyone; it's just that any kind of government authority gives him the creeps now.”

“Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.”

“If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain. Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.”

“It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.”

“Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.”

“There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.”

“Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion... What's the difference”

“Richard's ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn't enjoy that last cigarette.”

“Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.”

“...the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness.”

“I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerrilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyone in a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That's why I don't even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe--to see you, and to give a fuck--you've already blown it... We had a nice ride through the darkness. On those bikes we were weak and vulnerable, but invisible, elusive, aware of everything within a two-block radius.”

“-How long do you want these messages to remain secret?[...]+I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.”

“The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.”

“so efficient it doesn't waste power by making noise”

“…he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it’s happening to him. Very post-modern.”

“The basic problem for Lawrence was that he was lazy. He had figured out that everything was much simpler if, like Superman with his X-ray vision, you just stared through the cosmetic distractions and saw the underlying mathematical skeleton. Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin. He saw it in the curve of the silver bars on his glockenspiel, saw it in the catenary arch of a bridge and in the capacitor-studded drum of Atanasoff and Berry’s computing machine. Actually pounding on the glockenspiel, riveting the bridge together, or trying to figure out why the computing machine wasn’t working were not as interesting to him.”

“Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You—Rudy—and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us—it’s not that we’re smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he’s a farmer who didn’t get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way.”

“It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?”

“And Türing answered another,” Rudy said. “Who’s that?” “It’s me,” Alan said. “But Rudy’s joking. ‘Turing’ doesn’t really have an umlaut in it.” “He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,” Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.”

“a scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings”

“Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.”

“What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that hed been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.”

“The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.”

“BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements – this is how they convince themselves they didn’t get ripped off.”

“He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him.”

“Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind.""Like instructions for programming a VCR.”

“Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done.”

“Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.”

“Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.”

“...class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.”

“Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.”

“The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.”

“CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic.”

“World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds.”

“He parks in the far corner of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer space.”

“Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits.”

“War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.”

“You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not.""Why do you say that?""Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices - who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron.”

“Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.”

“Kids need to get answers from humans who love them.”

“If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've already blown it.”

“Well, once I had recovered from childbirth -" then she caught herself short, and smiled. "What a ridiculous expression; I see now that I shall be recovering until the day I die.”

“Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith.”

“But what little I’d heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.”

“What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?”

“That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see,” Orolo told me. “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

“Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith - faith in your U-boat, and your crew - beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing.”

“Not that any of the sysadmin’s knowledge and skills were applicable here.The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he’d be able to break through in the end.”

“And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.”