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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2a27b7f | Every culture can be kind of defined by what they drink in order to avoid dying of diarrhea. In China it's tea. In Africa it's milk or animal blood. In Europe it was wine and beer. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fd452c4 | If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6a03128 | The general picture was that Ymir would not be anything like the traditional idea of a spaceship, in the sense of an orderly, symmetrical piece of architecture. It would be more like a flying robotic anthill, constructed out of a natural found object. The robots crawling around on and in it had general instructions as to what they were supposed to be doing, but could make their own judgments from moment to moment to avoid collision with oth.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2264734 | Parking lots and chaos. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 64ef532 | What is the moral of your play, Jack?" "Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they've got Bibles, too." "Sound advice." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2e494b2 | No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b096276 | So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people's intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world--the habitat ring, the .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b302e25 | 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 | ||
| 4602482 | Leibniz's most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8d8f12e | His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 078a52a | I don't hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn't there to make Englishmen of you, and so it's Irish you are, by default. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5eb5b9f | That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage-wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once, he had feared that old age would bring senility; now, he was certain it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 39588d3 | At this point, all of the responsible adults in Lawrence's life seemed to arrive at a tacit agreement that the best way to raise him--certainly the easiest--was to leave him alone. On the rare occasions when Lawrence requested adult intervention in his life, he was usually asking questions that no one could answer. At the age of sixteen, having found nothing in the local school system to challenge him, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse went off.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d6a5eb5 | Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols--every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because the.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 86c7181 | Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 941ef40 | If no one is barfing, then none of us is likely to die, at least over a time span of weeks. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4a0eec6 | The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a4e9829 | think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3e08762 | After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b726484 | What destroys it? Is it the Inquisition? Those idiot priests go chasing after innocent women, as if real witches would let themselves be caught and tortured and killed! Almost by definition, anyone who is caught and tortured, and doesn't free themselves by magic, has no magic powers. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 793fd5e | Enoch Root] hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things--hangings included--with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of .. | boston capabilities colonial-america resourcefulness | Neal Stephenson | |
| f82af08 | You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0a3da93 | The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9ca9fb1 | Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 06a87a7 | The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has b.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| bf70cca | SHE LET US INTO THE house, which had the subtle smell of old wood and old wool--as I used to imagine Victorian homes smelled in Victorian times, before I was recently alerted to the painful truth that actually, at least here in London, they stink of whale oil, patchouli (woven into shawls to keep worms from eating the fabric in transit), and backed-up sewers. I am now convinced everyone here goes to church for the incense. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e924540 | But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 584abd0 | In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.' " Teague considered it for a moment, then nodded. "In Connaught," he added. "In Connaught," Bob agreed, then eyed the ditch." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6e86c97 | Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4238af3 | It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They'd never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning's sake--which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curricu.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 582be78 | The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c750954 | He finds an open boulevard of water that leads inward to the Core. It has a sort of pedestrian catwalk running along one side of it, pieced together haphazardly, a seemingly endless procession of gangplanks, pontoons, logs, abandoned skiffs, aluminum canoes, oil drums. Anywhere else in the world, it would be an obstacle course; here in the Fifth World, it's a superhighway. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5c5b0fe | Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women. There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long per.. | gender space-travel | Neal Stephenson | |
| 04efae1 | It was not the sharp bracing fear one felt on an adventure, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e87b2e4 | The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3f31855 | Once she gets over the shock of it and settles into a routine, she starts looking around her, watching the other fish-cutting dames, and realizes that this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend a.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| efc5300 | I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who "interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than normal. "All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goes through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database passes through my networks. The Metaverse -- -the entire Street -- exists by virtue of a network that I own and control. "But that means, i.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ec46581 | It's daytime. A wall of billowing orange flame grows up silently from the tank farm a mile away, like a time-lapse chrysanthemum. It is so vast and complicated in its blooming, uncontrolled growth that Rife stops halfway up the stairs to watch. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e5f21c0 | An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 28c9bde | Hiro and Y.T. have eaten a lot of junk food together in different joints all over L.A. -- doughnuts, burritos, pizza, sushi, you name it -- and all Y.T. ever talks about is her mother and the terrible job that she has with the Feds. The regimentation. The lie-detector tests. The fact that for all the work she does, she really has no idea what it is that the government is really working on. It's always been a mystery to Hiro, too, but then, .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ca92cb2 | Bud, you had to bribe the shit out of numerous Shanghai cops. There was no reason to economize here. Bud had a rich and boundless career ahead of him, vaulting up a hierarchy of extremely dangerous drug-related occupations for which decoy served as a paid audition of sorts. A start weapons system was a wise investment. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9993b2e | A man dressed in a radiant white uniform stands below the ragged maw of the jetway holding his hands downwards with fluorescent orange sticks in them, like Christ dispensing mercy on a world of sinners. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 50e97b1 | and two cats. He teaches medieval fighting techniques to members of the armed forces. The Mongoliad is his first published fiction. Erik Bear lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. He has written for a bestselling video game and is currently working on several comic book series. Cooper Moo spent five minutes | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fd5b115 | I doubt you even know what duty is," she retorted. A risky response--such flippancy of the tongue--and it might provoke them, but showing fear would invite a response. Half of combat is causing your opponent to think you are stronger than you are, Gansukh had told her. Scarface" | Neal Stephenson |