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6044a02
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I locked him out of the reticule," Esma said. "He was speaking incoherently of cheese."
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Neal Stephenson |
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a3b947e
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To be in a habitat--even a quite large and cosmopolitan one--when the Eye came around was, in pre-Zero terms, a little bit like being in a small town on the prairie and having a mobile Manhattan suddenly roll over the horizon, surround you, have a hundred kinds of intercourse with you, and then move on.
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Neal Stephenson |
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dca425e
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He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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76ca802
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All of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west
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Neal Stephenson |
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93d8839
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But the television news cameras couldn't get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f5375d6
|
In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2336b1c
|
right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas--you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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35086b6
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Native Americans had tricksters--creatures full of cunning--like Coyote and Raven in their mythologies, but they didn't have technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist-god.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f513fdd
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The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ee318a2
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a nice standing ovation from a studio audience of angels, who having all died themselves, know a good death when they see one.
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Neal Stephenson |
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698a498
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But in the time-honored manner of most human males, he allowed his eyeballs to swivel her way so that he could check her out, then turned his head so that he could check her out better
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Neal Stephenson |
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3488984
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From an evolution standpoint, what was the point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it. The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people--societies--rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he wa..
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Neal Stephenson |
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2d8d558
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Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer's part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b215836
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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.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1522c07
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These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be in shockingly poor taste until he remembers it's a German boat.
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Neal Stephenson |
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48eb0d1
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The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d9e3b92
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If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2264734
|
Parking lots and chaos.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3351be1
|
There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machi..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e098ed7
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To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been the kind of place for surprise visits.
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Neal Stephenson |
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564d470
|
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate trees. "Shit!" he says. "What's wrong, Sarge?" "I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says."
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Neal Stephenson |
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ecfc6df
|
The Japanese Mafia. Tell me something, Jason, you ever hear anyone describe our thing as 'The Sicilian Yakuza'? Huh?
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Neal Stephenson |
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23ab9b8
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Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e6155fd
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It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.
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Neal Stephenson |
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52bc4f8
|
Well, land sakes!" Hiro says. "Lookee here!" He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor. "Better fire up the ol' barbeque, Jemima!" Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face. "Didn't anyone tell you," he says, losing the diale..
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humor
puns
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Neal Stephenson |
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30e0bf5
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Two tires fly. Two wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b858914
|
Vyacheslav exited through New Caird's airlock, clambered down a stack of robots to the surface, and then made his way toward the site.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3095f0f
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As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.
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Neal Stephenson |
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803443b
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The wording does not come naturally in this bastard language of Sabir, but Moseh's plan was to synergistically leverage the value-added of diverse core competencies into a virtual entity whose whole was more than the sum of its parts...
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Neal Stephenson |
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affd1e7
|
The Bourbon-Orleans family tree is infinitely larger, more ramified, and more intertangled than can possibly be shown here, largely owing to the longevity, fertility, and polygamy of Louis XIV.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5b5501b
|
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c15ee27
|
this is the word--'politics'--that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ee3fdcf
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I get it," Richard said. "But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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ddef95d
|
When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9ef6705
|
The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial.
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Neal Stephenson |
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6a34e9c
|
We're all nerds now. We might as well get good at it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7ef2da6
|
the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2e3a1f3
|
Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs that sit on the bottom and eat sewage.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a422f0f
|
Orolo said, "What if these two universes--each as big and as old and as complicated as ours--were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them. Would that be enough to wrench A's time and B's time into perfect lockstep for all eternity?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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a59ae5a
|
Arsibalt was horrified. "But how can you not be fascinated by--" "I am fascinated," I insisted. "That's the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two."
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Neal Stephenson |
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c82bc6a
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Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together--that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them.
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Neal Stephenson |
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293c476
|
WITH CNAN'S HELP, Raphael dressed the knife wound on Haakon's hip. Raphael moved stiffly, and Haakon eventually saw why. A tiny stub of a broken arrow protruded from Raphael's back. When Raphael finished with Haakon, Cnan said something about the arrow.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9db39fa
|
To this point it probably looks like I am setting this up as a slam-dunk case for ambulating while working, and getting ready to lambaste treadmill-resistant managers as insensitive and tragically shortsighted knuckle draggers. Well, they are.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1d1c477
|
Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor
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Neal Stephenson |