691 Quotes by Neal Stephenson

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

So a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.

Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest.

It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.

She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that’s partly why they love me, and partly why they leave.

She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. 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.

The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however – for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.

Native Americans had tricksters – creatures full of cunning – like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn’t have technology yet, and so they hadn’t coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.