|
3b69635
|
Birth and death," Chet said. "The poles of human existence. We're like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
45cc136
|
They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7c45c62
|
Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c4d2035
|
Fearless for oneself, fear for others--that must be what it means to be a hero.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
75638c3
|
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
37f0074
|
Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's ready, the answer is always the same, sir!
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
3941a87
|
Hiro walks straight through the display, and it vanishes. Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they're still nothing more than video games. Hiro's not so poor, yet, that he would go and write video games for this company. It's owned by the Nipponese, which is no big deal. But it's also managed by the Nipponese, which means that all the programme..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9ed6f3d
|
The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low winter sun. Crystalline
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
727716f
|
His baseline attitude toward humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in the belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and there was no point in arguing about anything that would be so ob..
|
|
sales
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c6da01b
|
The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they'd printed up signed ..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ccbd17c
|
Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-running: not only the Quality from their town-houses, but hooligans and Vagab..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
98397c1
|
Or a Moonie festival or something.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
d4c40f2
|
The last year had been an education in how little having money really mattered. A rich Vagabond was a Vagabond still, and 'twas common knowledge that King Charles, during the Interregnum, had lived without money in Holland.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c25e829
|
I don't get this," Hiro says. "What is Snow Crash?" "It's a drug, asshole," the guy says. "What do you think?"
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
da1c7df
|
Well, I am not fully convinced that I really need this," Randy says. "We all need to decide that question for ourselves," says Avi."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
f3fbd6a
|
Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive wast..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
29fab13
|
To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9239402
|
The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
89cd1ca
|
But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c2afc9f
|
Cnan knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
4f0fb72
|
A gazebo on top of a welding rig" was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here." --
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7af72ee
|
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
0178aa2
|
The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
cbc3ed1
|
But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
5c3dc5a
|
It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic site. "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."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ca65f52
|
I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
61cdf67
|
I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.
|
|
mortality
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ed75372
|
The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
421b3dc
|
He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they're scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
3a8b207
|
What of the chain? Its position, defined by C, begins at 0 and reaches 1 when its next link moves forward to the fatal position, then 2 and so on. The chain must move in synch with the teeth on the sprocket at the center of the rear wheel, and that sprocket has n teeth, and so after a complete revolution of the rear wheel, when theta = 0 again, C = n. After a second complete revolution of the rear wheel, once again theta = 0 but now C = 2n...
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c6aa67f
|
That time in Seattle--during the lawsuit--was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
f059f19
|
Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c0117dc
|
Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers. With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
2c34ef5
|
Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie"--which doesn't include you, Julia--"will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
be3e66e
|
The question is, how long does Mr. Spinny have to live? And what does that tell us?
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a228035
|
Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alternations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it. --Sir Charles Petrie, THE VICTORIANS
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c749af9
|
Dr. Harris was now wishing that the late Doc Dubois had never opened his big fat mouth.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
2a57318
|
I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic forests there!" "What does that mean?" "Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
4380dbd
|
Shaftoe pulls off his dog tags and wraps the will around them, then wraps the dog tags' chain around the whole thing. He passes it down to the stern of the boat, where the boatman pockets it and cheerfully agrees to do the right thing with it when he gets back to Calamba.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
37645ae
|
Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah," Waterhouse says, or words to that effect."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
22f1437
|
In a sword-fighting drill, where one participant is going to mount an attack and the other is to respond in some way, the attacker is known as the agent and the respondent is known as the patient. The agent acts. The patient is passive.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c49d15c
|
All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that's why we can't do anything else when we're sleeping: it's when we work hardest.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
33f932a
|
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind thi..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
5f28994
|
it has left a neat bomb-shaped hole in the deck, just like a panicky Warner Brothers cartoon character passing at high speed through a planar structure such as a wall or ceiling.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |