Neal Stephenson Quotes & Sayings

He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion. And she, maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't. Hiro — Neal Stephenson

When I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something
something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of. — Neal Stephenson

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. — Neal Stephenson

There are only two industries. This has always been true ... There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment ... After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything. — Neal Stephenson

Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it. — Neal Stephenson

Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means Cod, so Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone
who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns. — Neal Stephenson

If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, — Neal Stephenson

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. — Neal Stephenson

Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"
Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as fresh as last night's eleventh nighmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!
"Just kill the one with the sword first."
"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt
you target them because they're the officers, right?"
"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword? — Neal Stephenson

The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world."
"And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer. — Neal Stephenson

Every fifth link in the Chain was public property. These tended to be parks, though some served as cultural facilities. So you were never more than two links away from green, or at least open, space. The other 576 links were privately owned, and constituted a commercial and residential real estate market that would have been easily recognizable to any pre-Zero property magnate. — Neal Stephenson

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on. — Neal Stephenson

She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions? But instead of lowering the boom on him, she just gave a simple answer: No. — Neal Stephenson

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. — Neal Stephenson

Larkin Schoendienst had told Betsy that in DC there were two ways to murder policy without appearing to have committed a crime. One was cobwebbing, in which a person with an idea--usually a young and bright person with a good, new idea--would fall victim to the surrounding bureaucrats, who would exclaim, 'Why, that's a good idea!' and throw out a web of reporting requirements, consulting requirements, or new budgeting procedures. Soon the person and his idea would be totally immobilized by a shimmering silken cocoon, to be put away and devoured another day.

The second method was the interagency task force. — Neal Stephenson

These are one-time pads. — Neal Stephenson

The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected with it, it lives in your brain forever. — Neal Stephenson

The sun shafted in and made her eyes glow, picking out glints of yellow in irises that were mostly green and brown. — Neal Stephenson

It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes. — Neal Stephenson

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

My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to — Neal Stephenson

The suit's got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn't affect your hearing, but it does. — Neal Stephenson

every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say 'tis the other way round. — Neal Stephenson

Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise. — Neal Stephenson

I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption. — Neal Stephenson

Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was. — Neal Stephenson

In fact, Kia is trans-just about every system of human categorization, and what she isn't trans- she is post-. — Neal Stephenson

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

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

So efficient it doesn't waste power by making noise — Neal Stephenson

Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence. — Neal Stephenson

Those of us who are going to live," Dinah Said, "have to start living by our own lights. — Neal Stephenson

just nuked . . . Venezuela? — Neal Stephenson

And so what moved him onward and down the office building's stairway was not any sort of foolish hope that he could actually be saved, but competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic. — Neal Stephenson

Did you win your sword fight?"
"Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world."
"And you wrote the software."
"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says. — Neal Stephenson

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity
it is, in a word, bourgeois
and so it attracts all of the same gripes. — Neal Stephenson

Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use. — Neal Stephenson

Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. — Neal Stephenson

Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying. — Neal Stephenson

I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is. — Neal Stephenson

I was wondering when I was going to end up like this. — Neal Stephenson

Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches - and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment — Neal Stephenson

Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish. — Neal Stephenson

Ymir," Luisa said, pronouncing it as she'd heard Sean do: ee-meer. A word from Norse mythology referring to primordial ice giants. Sean's code name for a particular hunk of ice that his project had identified, and that he meant to bring back. "Yeah. — Neal Stephenson

The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them. — Neal Stephenson

I'm strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I'd probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea. — Neal Stephenson

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

The Templar and Hospitaller commanders had argued with Calpurnius, the master of the Shield-Brethren company, as to the membership of the team that would lead the upper-floor assault. Calpurnius had listened calmly to both men's arguments and then asked one question. There will be no horses on this boat. How will your knights fight? — Neal Stephenson

The mind knows ... that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story. — Neal Stephenson

It is what you don't expect," he'd said, "that most needs looking for." "Do — Neal Stephenson

Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book? — Neal Stephenson

His idea of a satisfying outdoor experience had been to saunter out onto the terrace of a European hotel to smoke cigars and drink brandy. — Neal Stephenson

The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness — Neal Stephenson

Many set themselves the aim of rescuing the indifferent and the lazy - and end up lost themselves. The flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. - — Neal Stephenson

There was nothing you couldn't accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years. — Neal Stephenson

Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield that they have passed through the apocalypse while the rest of us are watching it on TV. — Neal Stephenson

I was discussing it with my teacher, over the jeejah - no pictures, just our voices. We had this long talk about this nerve and the muscles and ligaments around it and how I should manipulate them to help alleviate the problem, and suddenly I just flashed on how weird the whole thing was - two of us both relating to this image - this model - of another person's body that was in his mind and in my mind, but - " "Also seemingly in a third place," I suggested, "a shared place." "That's what it felt like. It freaked me out for a little while, but then I put it out of my mind because I thought I was just being weird. — Neal Stephenson

No point in describing the office. No point in even allowing the office to even
register on her eyeballs and take up valuable memory space in her brain.
Fluorescent lights and partitions with carpet glued to them. I prefer my carpet
on the floor, thank you. A color scheme. Ergonomic shit. Chicks with
lipstick. Xerox smell. Everything's pretty new, she figures. — Neal Stephenson

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

But for the moment it was just a pattern of sensory impressions painted on the screen of her memory, not soaked in yet, not understood, not even granted the dignity of having really happened. — Neal Stephenson

What else can you tell us about this batna, Surendranath?" "I learnt it from English traders in Surat," said the befuddled Surendranath, "It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. — Neal Stephenson

On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people of pre-Zero America, who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures — Neal Stephenson

That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about. — Neal Stephenson

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

Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank - a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing. — Neal Stephenson

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? — Neal Stephenson

Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag. He grins and waves. — Neal Stephenson

In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to mention its title, Volume III of Principia Mathematica entitled, The System of the World, available shortly, where books are sold. — Neal Stephenson

The Japanese Mafia. Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as 'The Sicilian Yakuza'? Huh? — Neal Stephenson

That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to? — Neal Stephenson

The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. — Neal Stephenson

War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble. — Neal Stephenson

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

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass. — Neal Stephenson

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

Every true heart needed a pragmatic counterweight, and every cynic an idealist to lift his spirits. — Neal Stephenson

Even the God of the New Testament is not as forgiving as the consumer credit system. — Neal Stephenson

I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish
this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was. — Neal Stephenson

Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. — Neal Stephenson

Semper Fidelis
Dawn star flares on disk of night
I fall, sun rises — Neal Stephenson

The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized. — Neal Stephenson

Flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. - John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Step — Neal Stephenson

Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons? — Neal Stephenson

But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost - swallowed up in the ocean - unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. — Neal Stephenson

On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin. — Neal Stephenson

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

He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly. — Neal Stephenson

to insist on everything's being reasonable, in a world that wasn't, was, in itself, unreasonable. — Neal Stephenson

A collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach), — Neal Stephenson

Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia. — Neal Stephenson

Interesting things happen along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the same. — Neal Stephenson

The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac's meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. — Neal Stephenson

In a sword-fighting drill, where one participant is going to mount an attack and the other is to respond in some way, the attacker is known as the agent and the respondent is known as the patient. — Neal Stephenson

I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and clothing. — Neal Stephenson

Maybe this was all down to some supernatural effect, such as grace, that flowed through people's lives even if they didn't understand why. — Neal Stephenson

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. — Neal Stephenson

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be - or to be indistinguishable from - self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time. — Neal Stephenson

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

The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read. — Neal Stephenson

HE WORKED IT OUT FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES ON THE WHITEBOARD — Neal Stephenson