|
897f736
|
Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
8804d72
|
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
e2d4293
|
You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That's how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7c73d09
|
It's not about how women are deficient. It's more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
3f01708
|
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.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
e74c268
|
Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here," he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
4027f92
|
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
2abe81c
|
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.
|
|
original
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b85665b
|
Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.
|
|
books
media
technology
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7610f02
|
Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov's habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
dd20e12
|
Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
d3dc0f1
|
You have responsibilities, now, Bob. You must lose this naive understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9d8a9ed
|
There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
90171ec
|
Apparently these three had left half of the surviving population of China seriously pissed off at them, as well as making mortal enemies with a rogue, defrocked Russian organized crime figure. In their spare time they had stolen money from millions of T'Rain players, created huge problems for a large multinational corporation that owned the game, and, finally--warming to the task--mounted a frontal assault on al-Qaeda.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
df01335
|
Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith.
|
|
religion
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b6d3bb0
|
Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
815a0d6
|
The revolution proceeded routinely and according to the rules of networked 21st-century protest.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
ef1ad42
|
after that it's just a chase scene.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
85908a4
|
People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.
|
|
revision
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
6b714fb
|
Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of..
|
|
history
western
society
technology
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
d43a0ee
|
If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
45635b7
|
Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
bfdf521
|
This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
82e527f
|
They made data a controlled substance.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a69a23e
|
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissastisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
01f55fc
|
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 disillu..
|
|
contradiction
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a6a2c76
|
It gave them something to do and it took their mind off the way Yuxia was driving, which, had they paid attention to it, might have been the most frightening thing they had seen all day.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
1e1dda3
|
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.
|
|
sleep
story
happy
people
jesus
funny
religion
truth
docile
frightened
population
terrifying
delusion
terrified
dying
scared
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
671d60a
|
Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.
|
|
know-it-alls
masculinity
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
57cec5f
|
It wasn't just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
7afa44a
|
Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old banknotes in the Smithsonian. 'First National Bank of South Bumfuck will remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,' or whatever. That had to stop because commerce became nonlocal--you needed to be able to take your money with you when you went out West, or whatever." "But if we're online, the whole world is local," Randy says."
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
9d0f961
|
The universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organised anomalies. Hackworth had once taken his family out rowing on the pond in the park, and the ends of the yellow oars spun off compact vortices, and Fiona, who had taught herself the physics of liquids through numerous experimental beverage spills and in the bathtub, demanded an explanation for these holes in water. She leaned over the gunwale, Gwendolyn holding ..
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
e5da708
|
We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
4628265
|
One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one's Times became to one's peers'.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
5891bc9
|
She just didn't think it decent to live in a place where there were no coffee shops to have breakfast in when she woke up,
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
8864002
|
The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.
|
|
humor
inspirational
ocean
math
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a6b72f2
|
What, not coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding's scrotum?
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
3773a33
|
The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S Navy flashlight. In the sotto voce one might use to correct an enourmous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanic lucifer is of such a superior design as to make any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone concerned.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
519c1fa
|
Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b9da574
|
Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
2247c9a
|
Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
81543dd
|
Richard's ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn't enjoy that last cigarette.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
73e00cb
|
Later, he was to decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |
|
a84d71e
|
Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart's content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.
|
|
|
Neal Stephenson |