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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f3bb64a | The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 090ba45 | Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn't go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1902f2e | On certain hilltops grew spruce forests, as fine and dense and soft-looking as the pelts of Arctic mammals. When the wind gusted through these, a sound issued from them that was like icy water hurrying over sharp stones. But most of the land was covered with heather, gone scab-colored for the winter. There the wind was silent, except for the raucous buller that it made as it banged around in the porches of Daniel's ears like a drunk burglar.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5b90b60 | What should we be doing in the meantime?" "All of the things you will look back on fondly later when you have not been able to do them for a long time." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c7747b8 | hydrological warfare. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6232d13 | Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ec6a00b | Wiener dog underwent explosive decompression, scared a baby. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e0de56b | What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective re.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3f3eac1 | Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 22ab52e | The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent unpredictability of usage--not every facility usage transaction necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and, for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even take into account the.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 01114d6 | Private Hott is with God now--or wherever people go after they die," says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root. "What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ! 'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4bbc73b | many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue. While creative, this approach has two drawbacks: 1) It clogs the plumbing, and 2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal crime. DON'T DO IT. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 79cad23 | Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls--otherwise, the world's largest collection of closed and locked doors. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f213920 | chanson de geste | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ee84e9f | What's it like working for Mr. Freeze?" "I was going to say the Penguin," Dinah said, "but people in Seattle don't carry umbrellas." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0b77809 | From long experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cebc1d9 | Then he walked home and died. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a4439a9 | Coals gleamed in the hearth and the air was fragrant with pine branches, frankincense, and lapsang souchong tea. It was New Year's Day. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f603e2f | The correct way to think about intelligence, in this case, is as a human quality shared by just about everyone, at least until it gets beaten out of us. Not a special gift that is bestowed on only a few. And secondly that it is a functional trait that most people find some way of using in their careers, or whatever it is that they spend their days doing. Sometimes, this trait is put to use doing theoretical physics, but much more often, it'.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 245c3f7 | If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be aware, and.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2dfdfb3 | The only human in evidence was a white-haired Constable whose belly had created a visible divergence between his two rows of brass buttons. He was bent over using a trowel to extract a steaming turd from the emerald grass. Circumstances suggested that it had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each other not far away, trying to roll each other over, which runs contrary to the laws of mechani.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0261d54 | If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the whole point of math. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 286fa9c | given all the other changes he's gone through, why the hell shouldn't he become a cigarette smoker while he's at it? Maybe next week he'll be shooting heroin. For something disgusting and lethal, cigarettes are amazingly enjoyable. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b004e24 | As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 96af99f | To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9c5a949 | All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world -- hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world." "Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe." The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "How does that follow?" "Sorry. It's a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent inf.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| eb1b26a | 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 Metaverse, basically--who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5995356 | His mind refused to accept that what he was hearing was laughter, and that it was coming from a human throat. He scrambled backward, and the shadowy figure leaped forward, grabbing at his trailing leg with an outstretched hand. As soon as its grip latched onto his ankle, he started screaming and kicking. The figure laughed, fighting to snare both his legs, and his cries of terror brought the other two back. They loomed over him, faces that .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 70b84c7 | you live in a shithole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 1811375 | snow n... 2.a. Anything resembling snow. b. The white specks on a television screen resulting from weak reception. crash v... -infr.. . . 5, To fail suddenly, as a business or an economy. - The American Heritage Dictionary virus.. . . [L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste.] 1. Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. 2. Path. a. A morbid principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some d.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 20bdefa | Disaster' is an astrological term meaning 'bad star. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 657da18 | Well," says Uncle Enzo. It is the "well" that begins the end of a conversation. "I was going to send you some roses, but you wouldn't really be interested in that, would you?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 36110a2 | El desarrollo de software comparte con el deporte profesional la caracteristica de lograr que los treintaneros se sientan decrepitos | computer-engineering computer-science software software-development | Neal Stephenson | |
| 3ef04f8 | But thoughts of this sort were chased away by others. One of those moments had arrived: Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being shrewd would've been. These moments seemed to come to Jack every few days. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 08dd134 | Like two arms of a snowflake, Mind and Matter grew out of a common center--and even though they grew independently and without communicating--each developing according to its own internal rules--nevertheless they grew in perfect harmony, and share the same shape and structure. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 68c5100 | The conventionally accepted explanation for this is that storytellers have a power of imagination that makes them good at inventing counterfactual narratives. In the light of everything we've learned about Strands at DODO, however, we can now see an alternate explanation, which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their "superpower" isn't imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceivin.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fff1230 | It's a solid hit, as solid as you can get on this nebula of air, upholstery, paint, and marketing known as the family minivan. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 58f2243 | One of the ice cubes in Doob's glass let out a little pop as it underwent thermal fracturing. Doob | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e7f5f11 | In the bottoms, reeds grew thick and green in rain-swollen waterways; low, shrubby willows populated a patchwork of sandy islands; and other water-hardy stuff grew in such profusion that only the most wretched fugitives were to be found there. Merely to dwell in such a place was to confess oneself an outlaw or a witch. The valleys and ravines that drained into it were choked with trees, generally too small and mean to be of interest to any,.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3cf28c9 | Wolf-Rayet stars | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7bfae2c | his whimper dying in his throat. There had been a flash of white moonlight reflecting off pale skin, and when the second one passed, he clapped his hand over his mouth to stifle his cry of terror at what he saw. The | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ce9e7ff | That's the bad news." "Okay, and what is the good news?" "All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days," she said, deadpan." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 88b1e2e | We don't believe in anything as simple as metempsychosis--the movement of an individual soul from one body to another. That's not what we mean by reincarnation at all." "What" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5445200 | Ymir," Luisa said, pronouncing it as she'd heard Sean do: ee-meer. A word from Norse mythology referring to primordial ice giants. Sean's code name for a particular hunk of ice that his project had identified, and that he meant to bring back. "Yeah." | Neal Stephenson |