|
75b367a
|
Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know." "Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer. "At the place we're going, you need to watch your manners. Don't say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'" "Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said. Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
2fb05d4
|
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge ver..
|
|
engineering
physics
school
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
f3c5ead
|
Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
d34a2e9
|
World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the hand..
|
|
life
food
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
dc653bb
|
It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words--are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
92040e6
|
Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7b2b906
|
the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
19efc19
|
If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
cd25ba4
|
Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
fd94fb5
|
They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9468282
|
CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ee60477
|
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 |
|
36e6521
|
How long do you want these messages to remain secret?[...] +I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7ca0c89
|
From long experience in places like Afghanisatan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognised, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what,..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c3570fb
|
You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not." "Why do you say that?" "Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices - who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
3cad44d
|
Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
c822b66
|
A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
|
|
philosophy
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
cf3d787
|
The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices.
|
|
humor
political-observation
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
aba0e7b
|
class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
51e996f
|
It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
bc58eeb
|
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.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
455a993
|
The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b108eb5
|
She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
accef25
|
Fighting isn't about knowing how. It's about deciding to.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
31446ec
|
As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
266a8b6
|
Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man's work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a73eff8
|
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
65fb8f5
|
What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphics except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use 'em to make short words for long words."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a0f9955
|
you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' ...
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
87dc702
|
So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9181b87
|
The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves.
|
|
librarian
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
f2e4ef0
|
In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
10653c9
|
The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9c88fe2
|
My men think you are dead now, and won't waste balls on you," Jack said. "In fact I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by 'Half-Cocked' Jack Shaftoe, L'Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!"
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ebb4ced
|
Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. 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. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxe..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
1839045
|
every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme--of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme.
|
|
library
scheme
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
70695ae
|
That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
93fa1f9
|
The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here--" he points to his head "--in the intelligence of the people, and here--" he holds out his hands "--in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold wa..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
87da745
|
Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
dc6dd99
|
That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse. None of which especially bothered Zula or made her doubt its worthwhileness. Making sad people feel better was a fine thing to do..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
71b3d42
|
It had been a hell of a long time since he had been reduced to hiding behind a tree, and he did not view it as much of a professional achievement.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
e909b11
|
Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
4215ecd
|
How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
71713ed
|
Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |