691 Quotes by Neal Stephenson

These women stared out from the canvases with arched brows, enormous eyes and tiny mouths, seeing much, and saying little.

If this had been France, and the Queen had been Louis XIV, it would have been done by now-but it was England, Parliament had its knobby fingers around the Monarch’s throat, and Whigs and Tories were joined in an eternal shin-kicking contest to determine which faction should have the honor of throttling her Majesty, and how hard.

All the Chinese people Richard had ever met had been sophisticated urbanites, so he had been half expecting that he would end up carrying the girl Yuxia on his back. But it became clear almost immediately that she was half mountain goat, or whatever the Chinese equivalent of a mountain goat was.

Que una industria semejante pudiera existir le pareció extraño e improbable hasta que leyó un artículo donde se calculaba que el tamaño de la economía mundial del oro virtual oscilaba entre los mil y los diez mil millones de dólares al año.

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

The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one's own ability to turn lead into gold. ("Enoch in Boston, 1713")

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

Hmmm.... supposing is a dangerous practice

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.