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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 29fab13 | To Randy and the others, the business plan functions as Torah, master calendar, motivational text, philosophical treatise. It is a dynamic, living document. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9239402 | The problem with those honorable men," Avi says, "is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 89cd1ca | But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c2afc9f | Cnan knew these gleaners and their types well enough that she could pick them out even in a healthy city. Not always were they the furtive criminals or crazed drunks. Indeed, within her short life, she had seen drunks rise to glorious battle and city fathers turn into ghouls. War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4f0fb72 | A gazebo on top of a welding rig" was how Yul might have described it, if only he had been here." -- | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7af72ee | Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0178aa2 | The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cbc3ed1 | But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5c3dc5a | It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic site. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round. "Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction, they're not headed our way anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. "Correction. No boat." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ca65f52 | I have been ranting and raving about this ever since the idea of the Cloud Ark was announced. So far all I get in return, from the powers that be, are vague answers and hand-wavy happy talk. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 61cdf67 | I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by. | mortality | Neal Stephenson | |
| ed75372 | The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 421b3dc | He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they're scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3a8b207 | What of the chain? Its position, defined by C, begins at 0 and reaches 1 when its next link moves forward to the fatal position, then 2 and so on. The chain must move in synch with the teeth on the sprocket at the center of the rear wheel, and that sprocket has n teeth, and so after a complete revolution of the rear wheel, when theta = 0 again, C = n. After a second complete revolution of the rear wheel, once again theta = 0 but now C = 2n... | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c6aa67f | That time in Seattle--during the lawsuit--was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f059f19 | Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c0117dc | Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers. With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2c34ef5 | Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie"--which doesn't include you, Julia--"will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| be3e66e | The question is, how long does Mr. Spinny have to live? And what does that tell us? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a228035 | Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alternations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it. --Sir Charles Petrie, THE VICTORIANS | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c749af9 | Dr. Harris was now wishing that the late Doc Dubois had never opened his big fat mouth. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2a57318 | I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic forests there!" "What does that mean?" "Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4380dbd | Shaftoe pulls off his dog tags and wraps the will around them, then wraps the dog tags' chain around the whole thing. He passes it down to the stern of the boat, where the boatman pockets it and cheerfully agrees to do the right thing with it when he gets back to Calamba. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 37645ae | Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah," Waterhouse says, or words to that effect." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 22f1437 | In a sword-fighting drill, where one participant is going to mount an attack and the other is to respond in some way, the attacker is known as the agent and the respondent is known as the patient. The agent acts. The patient is passive. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c49d15c | All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that's why we can't do anything else when we're sleeping: it's when we work hardest. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 33f932a | So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind thi.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5f28994 | it has left a neat bomb-shaped hole in the deck, just like a panicky Warner Brothers cartoon character passing at high speed through a planar structure such as a wall or ceiling. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6044a02 | I locked him out of the reticule," Esma said. "He was speaking incoherently of cheese." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a3b947e | To be in a habitat--even a quite large and cosmopolitan one--when the Eye came around was, in pre-Zero terms, a little bit like being in a small town on the prairie and having a mobile Manhattan suddenly roll over the horizon, surround you, have a hundred kinds of intercourse with you, and then move on. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| dca425e | 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. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 76ca802 | All of Rommel's supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 93d8839 | But the television news cameras couldn't get anywhere near the action, so the coverage mostly consisted of journalists interviewing each other about how little they knew. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f5375d6 | In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2336b1c | right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas--you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 52bc4f8 | Well, land sakes!" Hiro says. "Lookee here!" He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor. "Better fire up the ol' barbeque, Jemima!" Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face. "Didn't anyone tell you," he says, losing the diale.. | humor puns | Neal Stephenson | |
| 30e0bf5 | Two tires fly. Two wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b858914 | Vyacheslav exited through New Caird's airlock, clambered down a stack of robots to the surface, and then made his way toward the site. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3095f0f | As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 803443b | The wording does not come naturally in this bastard language of Sabir, but Moseh's plan was to synergistically leverage the value-added of diverse core competencies into a virtual entity whose whole was more than the sum of its parts... | Neal Stephenson | ||
| affd1e7 | The Bourbon-Orleans family tree is infinitely larger, more ramified, and more intertangled than can possibly be shown here, largely owing to the longevity, fertility, and polygamy of Louis XIV. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5b5501b | Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, USMC, pours some beans into the grinder and starts to belabor the crank. A black flurry begins to accumulate in the coffeepot below. He has learned to make this stuff the Swedish way, using an egg to settle the grounds. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c15ee27 | this is the word--'politics'--that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ee3fdcf | I get it," Richard said. "But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?" | Neal Stephenson |