Neal Stephenson Quotes

If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere.

I’m not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it.

Two tires fly. Two Wail.
A bamboo grove, all chopped down
From it, warring songs.

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

It’s, like, one of them drug dealer boats,” Vic says, looking through his magic sight. “Five guys on it. Headed our way.” He fires another round. “Correction. Four guys on it.” Boom. “Correction, they’re not headed our way anymore.” Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. “Correction. No boat.

There was no one moment when they definitely crossed over into Ameristan. The closest thing to a formal ceremony was when Tom pulled over onto the gravel shoulder of a two-lane road between cornfields and yanked off the vehicles' license plates—which was evidently held on with magnets... Then the caravan was back on the road.
“When in Rome,” Julian said... About an hour out of Des Moines, they did pass by a tiny sign—Sharpie on plywood—bearing what might have been the burning-cross logo of the Levitican Church.

Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.

My name is Melisande Stokes and this is my story. I am writing in July 1851 (Common Era, or—let's face it—Anno Domini)...London, England. But I am not a native of this place or time. In fact, I am quite desperate to get out of here...when I'm done writing this Diachronicle, I am going to take it to the very discreet private offices of the Fugger Bank...not to be opened for more than one hundred and sixty years. The Fuggers, above all people in this world, understand the dangers of Diachronic Shear.

So I'm well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of my books. I can remember at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby-Dick: There's a helicopter that gets brought down; there's a private jet that blows up; some people die; there's confrontation and a girl goes home with her mom — so it seems like a good ending to me. [audience laughter] Once you write a book or two with controversial endings — and that meme gets going, of “Stephenson can’t write endings” — then that gets slapped on everything that you do no matter how elaborate the ending is. I think Anathem does OK on that score. I'm sure that I'll be hearing from some of the “Stephenson can’t write endings” people, but I think that it has a decent enough ending.

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. 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. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.

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.

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the
right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I
moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years.
if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to
revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping
out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is
liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest
motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one
thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach,
of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man
could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop,
slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the
world title out of reach.
Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your
limitations. Make do with what you've got.

So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?