Neal Stephenson Quotes

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.

Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on.

Most of them don't actually care who wins because they understand it's just about who sits on the throne, they know the Crusaders aren't here to try to actually harm the city itself. All the potential emperors are assholes, and they're all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So the citizens are literally picnicking and placing bets on who wins the day.

Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing — this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing — is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.

[...] people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.

In layperson's terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don't understand it. If it's in a rack with fans blowing on it, that's a different story.

The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.

They laid in a course for Moab, which ought to have been as simple as laying in a course for any other place. But a little warning did come up on Sophia's UI, letting her know that the existence of Moab was in question. Opinions differed as to whether it had been burned off the surface of the world by a nuclear blast twelve years ago. ... “It’s easy to forget,” Sophia remarked, “that there are millions of people who really don’t believe that Moab still exists. But when you’re here, you see the REMEMBER MOAB stickers all over the place.”

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bomc,' I said. 'We have a protractor.'
Okay, I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.

In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions.

A good yuppie has no sense of smell.

I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I'd rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am.

She just didn’t think it decent to live in a place where there were no coffee shops to have breakfast in when she woke up,

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity — it is, in a word, bourgeois — and so it attracts all of the same gripes.

The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.