|
5a62401
|
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places," Raven says."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b3a8e26
|
A long fall. Dinah had ceased to even think in terms of up and down. The concept of falling had become meaningless to her.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
5748db6
|
Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king's Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had struck him as being straight from a 1970s album cover. And he had done some introspection about the fact that he couldn't even take such a lovely place at face value but only liken it to such pop culture references.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ece6cb5
|
A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to distribute, once he'd thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it--reassuring customers that they were actually getting something in return for their money. Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it open, finding that it's ninety-five percent air, th..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
dfcca82
|
The Templar and Hospitaller commanders had argued with Calpurnius, the master of the Shield-Brethren company, as to the membership of the team that would lead the upper-floor assault. Calpurnius had listened calmly to both men's arguments and then asked one question. "There will be no horses on this boat. How will your knights fight?"
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ba6a175
|
Their morning training was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a plainly dressed man. Lugo, the youngest initiate at the chapter house, noticed him first and nearly received a blow to the head as a result of his inattention. Shouting at the rest of the men to stop their drill, Andreas glared at the man who was standing inside the chapter house gate. "How might we assist you?" he called across the yard, more than a little annoyed at the..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
316477f
|
Andreas had been trying to remember the words to a ribald drinking song he had heard a few weeks ago when Saluador rode up next to him. The Spaniard's horse was a hand or so taller than his own, and in keeping with the man himself, much more spirited. Andreas was tall enough to see over most crowds, but Saluador eclipsed him readily. The Spaniard kept his beard and hair short, cropped close to his head, and when he smiled, his cheeks dimple..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
60406d9
|
Like any librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around without audible footfalls.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
cc58631
|
penetrates your iris, tenderest of sphincters,
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
22f86e3
|
I know," Julia said. "It is so difficult rebuilding an intelligence community from scratch. One must make do with the materials at hand. Their youth, their inexperience, and the openness they've come to expect from living their whole lives on the Internet--all are inimical to doing things as they ought to be done. That is why we need more experienced hands--people who have learned the right instincts."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
1898746
|
What are you going to say to the Maternal Organism?" Dinah asked, as Ivy rummaged in the back of a storage bin for her bottle of tequila. Ivy stiffened for a moment, then pulled out the bottle and swung it toward Dinah's head like a club. Dinah didn't flinch, just watched it glide to a halt above her head. "What?" "I can't believe that the Morg has so taken over my wedding that the first thing that comes into your mind is how she's going to..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
034de35
|
He has a kind of exaggerated politeness that is kind of like a military man.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
1ee2806
|
You have multiple core competencies with surprisingly minimal Venn.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
d633234
|
a post-agrarian religion in which literal sacrifice had been replaced by symbolic; they opened their meals with a re-enactment in effigy of that, then praised their God for a while, then asked Him for goods and services.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7af1a79
|
The commentary came from millions of idiots on the Internet.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
828557b
|
confined to a small volume of inhabitable space on Cleft for the remainder of their lives, were impoverished in many ways. Of information, however, they had an inexhaustible wealth. Essentially every document that had ever been digitized was available to them,
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
8a5c977
|
To the extent that Blue had a definable culture, it tended to view technological aids with some ambivalence, a state of mind boiled down into the aphorism "Each enhancement is an amputation." This was not so much a definable idea or philosophy as it was a prejudice, operant at a nearly subliminal level. It was traceable to certain parts of the Epic. In many of these, Tavistock Prowse played a role; he was seen as its literal embodiment in t..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
e22cabf
|
Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he'd purged all the people he did consider dangerous. With a few exceptions such as Isaac Barrow, none of them would have had any use for Isaac's sundial, because it didn't look like an old sundial, and they'd prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way. The cur..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
142a321
|
Hiro looks up, focuses his gaze on Earth, zooms in for a look. As he gets closer, the imagery he's looking at shifts from the long-range pictures coming in from the geosynchronous satellites to the good stuff being spewed into the CIC computer from a whole fleet of low-flying spy birds. The view he's looking at is a mosaic of images shot no more than a few hours ago.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a650ce8
|
Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
155299c
|
You're British, you're a priest, you're a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse Code, and most importantly of all, you're a fucking pain in the ass - so off you go!
|
|
war
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
79c8346
|
This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure or lean something. But we have been changed. We are standing close the Heraclitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces.
|
|
riches
moments
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9830061
|
Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?
|
|
joking
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
8ced249
|
Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, "What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible--you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?"
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
2a27b7f
|
Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
fd452c4
|
If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
6a03128
|
The general picture was that Ymir would not be anything like the traditional idea of a spaceship, in the sense of an orderly, symmetrical piece of architecture. It would be more like a flying robotic anthill, constructed out of a natural found object. The robots crawling around on and in it had general instructions as to what they were supposed to be doing, but could make their own judgments from moment to moment to avoid collision with oth..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
64ef532
|
What is the moral of your play, Jack?" "Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they've got Bibles, too." "Sound advice."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
2e494b2
|
No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b096276
|
So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people's intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world--the habitat ring, the ..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b302e25
|
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..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
4602482
|
Leibniz's most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
8d8f12e
|
His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
078a52a
|
I don't hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn't there to make Englishmen of you, and so it's Irish you are, by default.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
5eb5b9f
|
That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage-wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once, he had feared that old age would bring senility; now, he was certain it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
39588d3
|
At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence's life seemed to arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him--certainly the easiest--was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in the local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse went off..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
d6a5eb5
|
Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols--every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because the..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
86c7181
|
Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
941ef40
|
If no one is barfing, then none of us is likely to die, at least over a time span of weeks.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
4a0eec6
|
The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a4e9829
|
think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
3e08762
|
After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage,
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b726484
|
What destroys it? Is it the Inquisition? Those idiot priests go chasing after innocent women, as if real witches would let themselves be caught and tortured and killed! Almost by definition, anyone who is caught and tortured, and doesn't free themselves by magic, has no magic powers.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
793fd5e
|
Enoch Root] hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things--hangings included--with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of ..
|
|
capabilities
colonial-america
resourcefulness
boston
|
Neal Stephenson |