Neal Stephenson Quotes

His earlier conversation with Luisa had brought home to him, however, that ignoring politics might not be the wisest long-term strategy. He might not care about politics, but politics cared about him.

Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man’s work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.

The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

In this dream, Dodge was in the small town in Iowa where he had grown up...the grid street pattern of that town was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things.

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

...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.

"You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?"
"The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?"

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

...class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.

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 Russian.

...he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course, any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.

Of crows, people tended to predicate the same traits that they did of Asians.... Crows were commendably intelligent, and forever busy, but you couldn't tell them apart and their motives were inscrutable. But living inside of his own head, Corvus well knew his own motives. There was nothing wrong with those motives and he didn't need to justify them to anyone else.

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.

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.