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d6aea15
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He was tempted to park the SUV illegally, since, according to his calculations, the authorities were not likely to catch up with him and demand payment of the parking ticket before the end of the world, but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise.
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Neal Stephenson |
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62e96ce
|
Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e5e5902
|
Cord followed up with, "I like it here, but it's beginning to feel creepy. Does anyone else think it's creepy?" "You're talking to a bunch of guys," Yul said. "No one here is going to validate your feelings." She tossed sand at him."
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Neal Stephenson |
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929080d
|
But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun.
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Neal Stephenson |
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293825b
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Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.
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sysadmin
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Neal Stephenson |
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b607998
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Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e898178
|
If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs,..
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Neal Stephenson |
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49c0f19
|
Human nature doesn't change, Randy. Education is hopeless. The most educated people in the world can turn into Aztecs or Nazis just like that." He snaps his fingers." --
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Neal Stephenson |
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f927815
|
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7bd2a4c
|
Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are alrea..
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Neal Stephenson |
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8013d98
|
He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety-floating around on an ocean of generalized terror.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d056914
|
Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0ffa563
|
That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see," Orolo told me. "Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways."
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Neal Stephenson |
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f9909b2
|
Maybe we should go back and get their guns," Marlon suggested. "That's how it would work in a video game," Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing."
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Neal Stephenson |
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893125c
|
Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV-which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite-the people who go into the Meatverse, basically-who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer language..
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Neal Stephenson |
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1bf316e
|
Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e2df682
|
people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3f228fc
|
Sometimes, if you want to live and breathe tomorrow, you have to dive into the black depths today, and that is a leap of faith - faith in your U-boat, and your crew - beside which the saints' religious epiphanies amount to nothing.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cdfec33
|
You're going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan--then what?
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Neal Stephenson |
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143e5d5
|
he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it -- say, in a nice stained-glass window -- not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.
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Neal Stephenson |
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eeff621
|
Put 'em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f17e825
|
In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
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Neal Stephenson |
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498f418
|
In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent.
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intelligence
wisdom
knowledge
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Neal Stephenson |
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16aa6d5
|
Ever think of introducing yourself?" Y.T. says. "Nah," he says, "people always forget names. You can just think of me as that one guy, y'know?"
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y-t
snow-crash
name
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Neal Stephenson |
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e8dbf20
|
War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8a162d0
|
So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our br..
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Neal Stephenson |
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235af44
|
to insist on everything's being reasonable, in a world that wasn't, was, in itself, unreasonable.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3b69838
|
Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder's torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1ceab6a
|
and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d7b74aa
|
No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7e7f5c2
|
Tav started it," Aida said. "He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral."
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Neal Stephenson |
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42663d5
|
Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1293b85
|
I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.
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relationships
love
homosexuality
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Neal Stephenson |
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f52a9e9
|
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0a886f2
|
Many a ship's officer, caught in a storm or battle, and seized by a natural tendency to freeze up in terror, was moved to action by the vivid helplessness of his crew.
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Neal Stephenson |
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59de045
|
For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops." "The clock stops, you mean." "No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire's gone out, and the sun's gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-" now suddenly a s..
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Neal Stephenson |
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b8599a0
|
Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice," grumbled Newton."
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Neal Stephenson |
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b1ec95e
|
Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes.
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Neal Stephenson |
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50cd7f3
|
Actually, I've been thinking about that," Tristan said, and finally sat down again. "It's the dog that didn't bark."
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Neal Stephenson |
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a416b28
|
while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e21b01b
|
Donald Cameron has his own character in the world now!?" Skeletor exclaimed, in somewhat the same tone of voice as a tribune might have said, Hannibal has crossed the Alps with elephants!?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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22ef6a7
|
The Victorian era was an age of superlatives and larger-than-life characters, and as far as that goes, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse fit right in: what Victoria was to monarchs, Dickens to novelists, Burton to explorers, Robert E. Lee to generals, Dr. Wildman Whitehouse was to assholes. The only 19th-century figure who even comes close to him in this department is Custer.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f1cfb40
|
I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is."
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Neal Stephenson |
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ca9f508
|
Maybe this was all down to some supernatural effect, such as grace, that flowed through people's lives even if they didn't understand why.
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Neal Stephenson |