691 Quotes by Neal Stephenson

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

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.

Persons of quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company and gathering in clubs and coffeehouses to misinform one another.

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

Semper FidelisDawn star flares on disk of nightI fall, sun rises

Il mondo moderno è un disastro per chi si diletta a scrivere haiku: quante sillabe ci sono in «generatore elettrico»? Nove? Non ci starebbe neanche nel secondo verso.

I’m ready to commit to her at any time. But for god’s sake, I’m not even sure she’s heterosexual. It’d be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.

Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.

So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. 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 Russians.