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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 17a4eae | No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge," Dr. Waterhouse reminds him." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c2d9a26 | It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it. | sf | Neal Stephenson | |
| c34ac17 | What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 09d5901 | Reader, if you don't know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c9141ab | Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. 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,.. | computers persistence sysadmins | Neal Stephenson | |
| 043d127 | Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 080428e | He had come home late with take-out Thai and slammed into the sofa and tried to watch a movie, but kept drifting from it to the screen of his laptop. This was part of Corporation 9592's strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies--yes, the entire medium of cinema--to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed ente.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1277c6a | there is no honour among consultants. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a563469 | Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations. | soul-searching technology | Neal Stephenson | |
| bc12c6e | Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8cff1af | If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 596a32b | He is just your type," Uncle Meng said gently. "Please, do try not to fuck him." "How come it's okay for James Bond?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| bf1f4a1 | Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is--as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms--having problems. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2abdfd4 | This is a very odd conversation," Dappa observed. "On an arbitrary numerical scale of conversational oddness, ranging from one to ten, with ten being the oddest conversation I've ever had, and seven being the oddest conversation I have in a typical day, this rates no better than five," Daniel returned." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 331c5f5 | Why do they believe that?" "Because we are hackers," Csongor said, "and they have seen movies." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3ea9a29 | Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b47d361 | Dinah said, "Ivy, you want to take this or should I?" "I'll do it. You're busy," Ivy said. Dinah could hear her twisting around in the pilot's seat to look at Julia. She spoke as follows: "Julia. Shut up. If you say another fucking word I'll stave your fucking head in and put your corpse out the airlock. Nothing about this is acceptable. Starting with the fact that you are flapping your gums, posing a distraction to Dinah while she is carry.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 94ae3c0 | These simple terms--"come about," for example--denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0cd3add | there was nothing you couldn't accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3011a7c | Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a2ed1cd | There's no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you're granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pret.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1e7de25 | The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue--records that tell a consistent story. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| deb376b | A causal domain is just a collection of things linked by mutual cause-and-effect relationships." "But isn't everything in the universe so linked?" "Depends on how their light cones are arranged. We can't affect things in our past. Some things are too far away to affect us in any way that matters." "But still, you can't really draw hard and fast boundaries between causal domains." "In general, no. But you are much more strongly webbed togeth.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a7c81eb | When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tianan.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6ccdc9a | Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her--disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just pla.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 58abad7 | All beings tremble before danger, all fear death. When a man considers this, he does not kill or cause to kill. | death killing pacifism | Anonymous | |
| e585197 | When you discover a prospect for Alcoholics Anonymous, find out all you can about him. If he does not want to stop drinking, don't waste time trying to persuade him. You may spoil a later opportunity. This advice is given for his family also. They should be patient, realizing they are dealing with a sick person. | Alcoholics Anonymous | ||
| a20e27e | Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time. | trolls | Neal Stephenson | |
| 9d6fa46 | Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it's too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It's a man's most anonymous age. | Stephen King | ||
| 6a602c8 | And there was something familiar about the cadence of the words. The language. It was him. I wrote: I know who you are. I recognize your voice. by kidzero I felt a little dizzy after I sent it, maybe because I had been holding my breath. A new message pinged and the air rushed out of me like a deflated balloon. you shouldn't be talking to strangers anyway. who am I? by anonymous I didn't really know his name or anything about him, but I co.. | Rae Mariz | ||
| 6b8c804 | Remember that we deal with alcohol--cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us. But there is One who has all power--that One is God. May you find Him now! Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unm.. | Alcoholics Anonymous | ||
| 256285b | We were now at Step Three. Many of us said to our Maker, as we understood Him: "God, I offer myself to Thee--to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!" We thought well before taking this step making sure we were.. | Alcoholics Anonymous | ||
| b34a3fb | A lot of men think they are doing women a favour by asking for her hand in marriage, but lets think about this : She changes her name, changes her home, leaves her family, moves in with you, builds a home with you, gets pregnant for you, pregnancy changes her body, she gets fat, almost gives up in the labour room due to the unbearable pains of child birth, even the kids she delivers bear your name. .. Till the day she dies... Everything she.. | Anonymous | ||
| 14c0bcc | Zarathustra: Do you have words? Do your words belong to you? Giannina: No, my answer is no. I have no property in the dictionary. Words are anonymous like the disenfranchised masses that haven't been weighed - or named - or framed. My words belong to those who don't belong. | Giannina Braschi | ||
| f9b824b | I was no more than the garment worker who made sure the stitching was correct in an outfit designed, produced, and consumed by the wealthy white people of the world. They owned the means of production, and therefore the means of representation, and the best that we could ever hope for was to get a word in edgewise before our anonymous deaths. | Viet Thanh Nguyen | ||
| f7c987d | justice, n. I tell you about Sal Kinsey, the boy who spit on me every morning for a month in seventh grade, to the point that I could no longer ride the bus. It's just a story, nothing more than that. In fact, it comes up because I'm telling you how I don't really hate many people in this world, and you say that's hard to believe, and I say, "Well, there's always Sal Kinsey," and then have to explain. The next day, you bring home a photo of.. | David Levithan | ||
| 2b581f2 | Why, though? I knew it didn't make sense. I did love her in my own way. Very much. She was beautiful and fun and caring, but I was bored, so bored. I had to think of other girls to get a hard-on. I didn't want to start the long arduous road to her orgasm, let alone mine. Afraid to touch her in case it was mistaken for an application for sex. So in order to feel something through the numbness, I decided to perpetrate on my soul and hers the .. | Anonymous | ||
| e8a6d51 | Naruto had always mocked him for it--cynical little Naruto, who would have preferred not to even bother attempting something that hard. Failure was so much easier to excuse if you knew you hadn't really been trying. | anonymous | ||
| fa05003 | It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collisi.. | language words | Italo Calvino | |
| 0a46999 | Most such criticism and confrontation, usually made impulsively in anger or annoyance, does more to increase the amount of confusion in the world than the amount of enlightenment. For the truly loving person the act of criticism or confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance. To confront one's beloved is to assume a position of moral or intellectual superiority over the l.. | M. Scott Peck | ||
| ec06789 | You wish to be anonymous?" "I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned--they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there." "Many can't go there; and many would rather die." "If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do i.. | Charles Dickens | ||
| 716e47a | doubtless imagine that I have acquired all the wealth and luxury that you see me enjoy without difficulty or danger, but this is far indeed from being the case. I have only reached this happy state after having for years suffered every possible kind of toil and danger. | Anonymous | ||
| d29743e | Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat. Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there. | christianity hinduism islam metaphysics philosophy religion science theology | Anonymous | |
| 0a6d73d | The sages would say similarly, "Just for the heaven of it." Just to reach for the highest. Human beings cannot live without challenge. We cannot live without meaning. Everything ever achieved we owe to this inexplicable urge to reach beyond our grasp, do the impossible, know the unknown. The Upanishads would say this urge is part of our evolutionary heritage, given to us for the ultimate adventure: to discover for certain who we are, what t.. | Anonymous |