691 Quotes by Neal Stephenson

Maybe that’s how great warriors do it. Carelessly, not wracking their minds with the consequences.

A lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That’s applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person.

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.

One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I’ve lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.

Southern California doesn’t know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

I don’t like sewing machines. I don’t understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It’s contrary to nature and it irritates me.

Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations – whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes – without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn’t been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.

The answer was that it was about twenty degrees west of their projected apogee, encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri, and heading generally in the direction of the Cape Verde boneyard that separated the Greenwich segment from the Rio segment. Which meant that it would soon be in the predominantly Ivyn part of the ring.