Stephenson Quotes & Sayings

Moira wished she spoke better Russian so that she could talk to Tekla about her ideas regarding appearance and grooming. The facial scars put her well outside the norms of feminine beauty and she had doubled down by electing to keep the buzz cut. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she was, to put it bluntly, kind of hot. Moira hated to say it. But hotness was a part of the human condition and it was pointless to pretend that it did not exist. — Neal Stephenson

At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently. — Neal Stephenson

But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book. — Neal Stephenson

He is just your type," Uncle Meng said gently. "Please, do try not to fuck him."
"How come it's okay for James Bond? — 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

But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's own fears, to project confidence at all times. — Neal Stephenson

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

I just saved your fucking life, Mom ... You could at least offer me an Oreo. — Neal Stephenson

Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table. Hiro
buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub Special, mixed
half and half with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought to remain awake a
little longer than he would otherwise.
It doesn't take much to make him open up. He's like one of these old guys from
a disgraced presidential administration, forced out by scandal, who devotes the
rest of his life to finding people who will listen to him. — Neal Stephenson

Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it's warmer) sweet basil. — Neal Stephenson

Find people who love you unconditionally, surround yourself with them, and bring them the same level of intensity. — Sean Stephenson

But the only feature of the view that ever changed was the signatures of foam deposited on the beach by the waves. Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own runup onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start, but each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of grey foam and got buried underneath the next. — Neal Stephenson

But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills. — Neal Stephenson

Boredom is a mask frustration wears. — Neal Stephenson

Orolo said, What if these two universes - each as big and as old and as complicated as ours - were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them. Would that be enough to wrench A's time and B's time into perfect lockstep for all eternity? — Neal Stephenson

There are times in every person's life when they feel lonely, isolated, like maybe they don't belong. For adoptees, this is often exacerbated by the circumstances. Because you were given up, you have a built-in scapegoat; you can blame everything that you feel on the fact that you were adopted. But, I want you to know that this is a fallacy. Finding your biological parents will not fill in the void that you feel. You will get answers to your questions, but no one can fill in the missing pieces except for you. Before you go on a search, take the time to get to know yourself very well. Heal the hurts you've experienced. Acknowledge the past and how it has affected you. Become a whole person who is seeking roots, not a damaged person who is seeking fulfillment. — Janet Louise Stephenson

The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience. — Pamela Stephenson

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

boggles the mind. Whether — Matt Stephenson

This is the wonderful thing about espionage, nothing exists any more. — William Stephenson

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. — Neal Stephenson

The expenditure of paper and printer ink had been somewhat lavish. Two generations from now, if any humans survived, they would look on this heap of documents with some combination of disgust and amazement. Because paper was going to be scarce by then, and they would view its use for such purposes in roughly the same way as Americans of the twenty-first century had viewed the use of sperm whale oil to fuel streetlamps. — Neal Stephenson

One of the ice cubes in Doob's glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing. Doob — 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

Ammonia worked better, but it was dangerous, and you couldn't easily get more of it in space. If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy. A hundred years from now everything in space would be cooled by circulating water systems. But for now they had to keep the ammonia-based equipment running as well. Further — Neal Stephenson

On a sub, you know, there's no place for things to drain to. The survivors claimed that the blood was knee-deep all through the submarine. — Neal Stephenson

It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge. — Neal Stephenson

Reality is what we make it. Or what is made for us by the companies we keep. It is our clay from which we fashion ourselves. — Neal Stephenson

All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty. — Neal Stephenson

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. — Neal Stephenson

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo
which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead. — Neal Stephenson

And he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover. — Neal Stephenson

What is your name?" Ariane asked him. The kid put up his deflector screens and said, "Einstein." Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer. — Neal Stephenson

They made data a controlled substance. — Neal Stephenson

This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame's a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. — Neal Stephenson

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

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. — Neal Stephenson

It is one thing to go on stage and be funny or be in a good place in your career, but for a woman, actually facing the elements in a physical way is a very powerful thing. — Pamela Stephenson

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places, — Neal Stephenson

And has it ever occurred to you, Miss Griffith, that you would probably not be able to take a good express train to London if little Georgie Stephenson had been out with his youth movement instead of lolling about, bored, in his mother's kitchen until the curious behaviour of the kettle lid attracted the attention of his idle mind? — Agatha Christie

if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day. RAVENSCAR: — Neal Stephenson

The uniform has a hundred pockets, big flat pockets for deliveries and eensy narrow pockets for gear, pockets sewn into sleeves, thighs, shins. The equipment stuck into these multifarious pockets tends to be small, tricky, lightweight: pens, markers, penlights, penknives, lock picks, bar-code scanners, flares, screwdrivers, Liquid Knuckles, bundy stunners, and lightsticks. A calculator is stuck upside-down to her right thigh, doubling as a taxi meter and a stopwatch. On — Neal Stephenson

It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists. — Neal Stephenson

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

For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme - of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme - pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be understood again. — Neal Stephenson

In the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince. — Neal Stephenson

Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties. — Neal Stephenson

encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri, — Neal Stephenson

People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes. — Neal Stephenson

We are all in trouble ... with a bunch of dead people. — Neal Stephenson

Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That's how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward to another generation on another continent. Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from. — Neal Stephenson

Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie" - which doesn't include you, Julia - "will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint. — 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

She definitely heard the words for airplane and airport, which delighted some little-girl part of her soul ("Yay, going on a trip!") even as her higher brain was ticking off all the bad things that could happen when men like Jones came into proximity with jet aircraft. — Neal Stephenson

[In eighteenth-century Britain] engineers for the most began as simple workmen, skilful and ambitious but usually illiterate and self-taught. They were either millwrights like Bramah, mechanics like Murdoch and George Stephenson, or smiths like Newcomen and Maudslay. — John Desmond Bernal

He is flitting and hopping about in the lobby like a sparrow whose nest had just been blown down in a windstorm. — Neal Stephenson

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

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. — Neal Stephenson

Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners ... If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything ... Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another. — Neal Stephenson

Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here, he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection. — Neal Stephenson

For three thousand years it had been the concent's policy to accept any and all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw one away. On one and only one occasion, this had turned out to be a wise policy: the millennial Apert of 3000, when 27,500 pilgrims had swarmed in through the gates to enjoy a square meal and see the End of the World. We had folding chairs made of bamboo, machined aluminum, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, hand-carved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal, and plaited grass. Tabletops could be made of old-growth lumber, particle board, extruded titanium, recycled paper, plate glass, rattan, or substances on whose true nature I did not wish to speculate. Their lengths ranged from two to twenty-four feet and their weights from that of a dried flower to that of a buffalo. — Neal Stephenson

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is. — Neal Stephenson

He was tempted to park the SUV illegally, since, according to his calculations, the authorities were not likely to catch up with him and demand payment of the parking ticket before the end of the world, but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise. — Neal Stephenson

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right. — Neal Stephenson

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. — Neal Stephenson

I definitely have to keep stepping up to the plate and be aggressive when he does that. — Lance 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

Being a psychologist did enable me to maintain objectivity. — Pamela 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

This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure or lean something. But we have been changed. We are standing close the Heraclitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces. — Neal Stephenson

Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value. — Neal Stephenson

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots. — Neal Stephenson

I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk. — Neal Stephenson

Gold is the corpse of value... — Neal Stephenson

The question is, how long does Mr. Spinny have to live? And what does that tell us? — Neal Stephenson

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 [ ... ] — Neal Stephenson

But when you walk through yonder gate," Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, "you'll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. 'Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You're a Bishop, and I'm a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light 'Tis difficult to make out your true shade. — Neal Stephenson

Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules. — Neal Stephenson

We were trained to live by our wits, in any circumstance. — William Stephenson

Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts. — Neal Stephenson

Snow n ... 2.a. Anything resembling snow. b. The white specks on a television
screen resulting from weak reception.
crash v ... -infr ... 5, To fail suddenly, as a business or an economy. -
The American Heritage Dictionary
virus ... [L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste.] 1.
Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. 2. Path. a. A morbid
principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some
disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by
inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them ... 3.
fig. A moral or intellectual poison, or poisonous influence. -The Oxford
English Dictionary — Neal Stephenson

He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice. — 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

From long experience in places like Afghanisatan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognised, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr's heavens. — Neal Stephenson

confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every document that had ever been digitized was available to them, — Neal Stephenson

If you can't test it, it's not theorics
it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy. — Neal Stephenson

The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you'd just hate to disappoint her. — Neal Stephenson

To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy. — Neal Stephenson

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

That sounds like bulshytt! — Neal Stephenson

Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan's physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater. — Neal Stephenson

Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover — Neal Stephenson

If money is a science, then it is a dark science ... it has gone on developing ... by its own rules — Neal Stephenson

This Snow Crash thing
is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?"
Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference? — Neal Stephenson

When you smile at people, its a signal to what you are bringing to their life. — Sean Stephenson

You make a new life by making new choices. — Sean Stephenson

What makes you think they're spying on you?" "Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math - Evoked - and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again. — Neal Stephenson

We could end up in prison married to the guy with the most cigarettes. — Neal Stephenson

And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient. — Neal Stephenson

The work of a psychotherapist involves being empathic and insightful with one's patients without getting too lost in their painful stories to be helpful. — Pamela Stephenson