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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d6e122f | It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 64508ef | This is a terrible country for old people. You put them away in horrible buildings that are completely shut off from life, and then do everything possible to keep them alive. It is a very stupid system. You | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2ba9169 | Those of us who are going to live," Dinah Said, "have to start living by our own lights." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8a1f3a8 | I didn't have anything really exiting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger breath. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 047a54b | Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. "This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it--which must have been a great spiritual struggle--and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 22d2784 | There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes--that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives--until they came here, and joined ours. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c5a675a | Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means Cod, so Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cb3ba8d | The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d178d33 | I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible--states of affairs removed from them in space and time--ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8671083 | While that thing was on, we ran a ridiculous amount of data through our servers." "How much?" I asked. He looked exasperated. "Enough that I could make up some kind of strained analogy involving the contents of the Library of Congress and the number of pixels in all of the Lord of the Rings movies put together and how many phone calls the NSA intercepts in a single day and you would be like, 'Holy shit, that's a lot.'" "Holy shit, that's a .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c9a3027 | 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. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 57f6a9d | The Fourth Crusade was an epic clusterfuck a comic-opera misadventure a tragic saga with farcical elements. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d71dadf | Identity" had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant "who you really are" but now it meant "any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f40a1a2 | Most of their children had reached the age when they were no longer naturally endearing to anyone save their own parents; the size when their energy was more a menace than a wonder; and the level of intelligence when what would have been called innocence in a smaller child was infuriating rudeness. A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance abou.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4f25b8c | People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1ba776d | I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible--states of affairs removed from them in space and time--ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I thin.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f9b7ffa | I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I'm almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension. I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore. But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves. Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it. But then, before I can form any firm impression of what it is I'm seeing, I sink back down of my own weight, an.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ae538d2 | Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?" A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention. Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting that information. It's probably nothing. The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Me.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 29d0b32 | Down by the river, Down by the banks of the River Charles That's where you'll find me Along with lovers, muggers and thieves Well I love that dirty water, Oh Boston, you're my home. --The Inmates | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 148b57f | Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone's half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you're sunk. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1eafc20 | You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo. "You spoke crooked words and I straightened them," -- | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a362d3b | The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts. | future life science-fiction | Neal Stephenson | |
| 5d880c9 | Magical?" "Non." "Magnificent?" "Don't be absurd." "Less bleak than anything else we have seen?" "Now truly you are speaking French," the ambassador said approvingly." | pessimism | Neal Stephenson | |
| b0e88c2 | A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. Th.. | insect quantum | Neal Stephenson | |
| e015d23 | 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. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b1b30cd | Dames lie about anything - just for practice. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 1ff56e5 | Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case... He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions. | detective-fiction police | Raymond Chandler | |
| e8b1eee | It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure.' 'That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said. | identification mystery police | Raymond Chandler | |
| d781345 | From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| a880bdd | She'd make a jazzy weekend, but she'd be wearing for a steady diet. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| ea48d38 | There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest, but honesty is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn't know what to be honest about. He thinks.. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| dbbaa03 | What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old.. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 536b0af | I walked to the windows and pulled the shades up and opened the windows wide. The night air came drifting in with a kind of stale sweetness that still remembered automobile exhausts and the streets of the city. I reached for my drink and drank it slowly. The apartment house door closed itself down below me. Steps tinkled on the quiet sidewalk. A car started up not far away. It rushed off into the night with a rough clashing of gears. I went.. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 9702102 | What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 1e1932e | She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen's lunch | Raymond Chandler | ||
| f3abc65 | Una tipa que sonaba a borracha perdida cantaba ''Frankie and Johnny'' en version marinera, con una voz que ni el whisky habia logrado mejorar. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| b612460 | He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He's going to let it go on a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he's apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order. | sarcasm | Raymond Chandler | |
| 04fbfa8 | Mr. Cobb was my escort," she said. "Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten--when Larry Cobb was sober." | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 4710453 | Permaneci sentado, muy quieto, escuchando como iba aquietandose la tarde por las ventanas abiertas. Y, muy lentamente, fui aquietandome con ella. | policial | Raymond Chandler | |
| a6908fc | The voice on the telephone seemed to be sharp and peremptory, but I didn't hear too well what it said, partly because I was only half awake and partly because I was holding the receiver upside down | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 789b451 | The subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 394d025 | The next hour was three hours long | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 81ec017 | I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn't like, but that's what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt. | Raymond Chandler | ||
| 9e6e5d9 | I did it for you. I took in a pint of bourbon with me. She's a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud and if she has washed her hair since Coolidge's second term, I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all. | Raymond Chandler |