Neal Stephenson Quotes

The amount of time spent asleep didn't really matter. He had decided that the key to it all — the one thing that determined whether the nap would actually refresh him — was the breaking of the thread of consciousness...Even if he woke up ten seconds later, he would be as refreshed — possibly more so — as if he'd slumbered deeply for an hour.

any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.

I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?

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.

Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god’s wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him–the helpless, innocent victim, that is–into let’s say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. So if Arachne had dissed anyone else in the Pantheon, she would have been just a smoking hole in the ground before she knew what hit her.

the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots.

"The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code — but their children believe it for entirely different reasons."
"They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it."
"Yes. Some of them never challenge it — they grow up to be small minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel — as did Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw."
"Which path do you intend to take, Nell?" said the Constable, sounding very interested. "Conformity or rebellion?"
"Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded — they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity."

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."

Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all the good stuff was use to grease propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.

It is the smell of War.

“Where on earth are you going?” Zula asked, looking about for him. But she had lost him in the radiant fog.
His voice was clear, though. It was the only sound in the world.
“I’m not entirely sure,” he admitted. “But I’m done here. I did what I was sent to do.”
The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more.

Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.

"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?"

Gold is the corpse of value...