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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2318354 | a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 72fdf37 | I study dead languages for a living," I said. "That's why you hired me. Why should I be up to speed on your line of work? How's your Serbo-Croatian? What's your position on the relationship between Oscan and Marrucinian?" He" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 842c132 | Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it's warmer) sweet basil. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 630e246 | Biology is usually a lot more fun than physics. It's a lot easier to understand, and there's sex. | Alexander Rosenberg | ||
| 31c31bd | can't say I mourned my failure overmuch, as it meant I'd get a free trip to New Orleans out of it, and that would rock be most excellent. I DROVE BACK to the office late in the day to find Tristan collapsed on the couch from exhaustion. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ed5a05b | Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market. "So" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 32f98cd | My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 68ccc1a | It is what you don't expect," he'd said, "that most needs looking for." "Do" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 5f3555f | and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise | Neal Stephenson | ||
| df60e91 | 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 | ||
| 34f4427 | Shall we then say, like Newton, that all such truths are made arbitrarily by God? Shall we seek such truths in the occult? For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nature. To me this notion is offensive; it seems to cast God in the role of a capricious despot who desires to hide the truth from us. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2a8570a | In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn't recognize. If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere. But when a businessman from New Jer.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| bb140a6 | They walk into the hop field. Carefully. There is an enveloping smell, a resiny odor not unlike marijuana, the sharp smell that comes off an expensive beer. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 51b580f | For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme -- of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme -- pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when w.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 24cfe90 | Perception and thought are properties of souls. It is no worse to posit that the fundamental building-block of the Universe is souls than to say it is wee bits of hard stuff, moving about in an empty space that is pervaded by mystickal Fields. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 27e5355 | The hasty shake-and-bake nature of the Ymir expedition, which had stirred up so much controversy, had been forced by the implacable timeline of celestial mechanics. Time, tide, and comets waited for no man. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 59fd67e | Got himself fired for pulling a sword on an acknowledged perp. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp's shirt, gliding the flat of the blade along the base of his neck, and pinned him to a warped and bubbled expanse of vinyl siding on the wall of the house that the perp was trying to break into. Thought it was a pretty righteous bust. But they fired him anyway because the perp turned out to be the son of the vice-chancellor of the Far.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| aa11338 | Early in the Reticulum--thousands of years ago--it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information," Sammann said. "Crap, you once called it," I reminded him. "Yes--a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulu.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 361ec10 | As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R." "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 54ee2a5 | Bulshytt: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a derogatory term for false speech in general, esp. knowing and deliberate falsehood or obfuscation. (2) In Orth, a more technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8a98965 | But a trick of the voice and the general body language was enough that I had a visceral desire to simply avoid him. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 80cc7ea | L1, by process of elimination," Luisa said drily, and laughed. "You space people love to count down, I know your ways." "It's" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| d651179 | It is the truth," said Oda-sensei. "Sometimes the truth is flattering." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 76a8d3c | Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake' and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0d85ec4 | But that's bullshit!" Doug says. "Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 94213bf | The stuff was tremendous, like drinking your favorite book. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7bd773f | Sline: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a slang word formed by truncation of baseline, which is a Praxic commercial bulshytt term. It appears to be a noun that turned into an adjective meaning "common" or "widely shared." (2) A noun denoting an extramuros person with no special education, skills, aspirations, or hope of acquiring same. (3) Derogatory term for a stupid or uncouth person, esp. one who takes pri.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c8e5aa7 | Ideas are good things to have even if they are old. Even to understand the most advanced theorics requires a lifetime of study. To keep the existing stock of ideas alive requires...all of this." And I waved my arm around at the concent spread out below us." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| af329ab | THE APOSTOLIC CAFE had expanded its offerings to include Euclid's Grill--casual buffet by day, fine dining by night, served in the former nave. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8aed361 | Topology is destiny, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 96949dd | Ita: (1) In late Praxic Orth, an acronym (therefore, in ancient texts sometimes written ITA) whose precise etymology is a casualty of the loss of shoddily preserved information that will forever enshroud the time of the Harbingers and the Terrible Events. Almost all scholars agree that the first two letters come from the words Information Technology, which is late Praxic Age commercial bulshytt for syntactic devices. The third letter is dis.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ebf8340 | For each stop--each timbre, or type of sound, that the organ could make (viz. blockflote, trumpet, piccolo)--there was a separate row of pipes, arranged in a line from long to short. Long pipes made low notes, short high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an upward-tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose pipes, a pencil, and paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When Lawrence unde.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| c81044d | I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial." That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: "Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?" "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor." "Okay, I'll go home and see if I can.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f9c9f07 | FORERUNNER (deprecated synonyms: SUICIDE BOMBER, DEAD MAN RUNNING, SCHNEIDER) One who is Sent to a DTAP in which DODO has no Known Compliant Witch, safe house, or other contacts/infrastructure whatsoever. Considered the most elite and difficult-to-recruit subclass of DOer, Forerunners must possess all the skills of a STRIDER (see below) combined with those of a FIGHTER, LOVER, or CLOSER. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8bbe25f | FIGHTER (deprecated synonyms: CONAN, WARRIOR) One who specializes in missions where, to put it politely, martial attributes are of the essence. Since every DTAP has a unique environment surrounding weapons, fighting styles, and martial culture, competence in fighting is only a part of the skill set required to be a successful Fighter. It is equally important to know how and when to fight. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 65eed8e | The place was famous for always having 'six comely maidens' working there," I said, with air quotes, "'serving the customers ale and aught.'" "What's aught?" asked Tristan. "Whatever you want it to be," I said." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6ca0973 | it was connected, by an underground tunnel and secret passages on every floor, directly to the brewery itself--thus allowing johns who needed to remain anonymous a way to escape if the brothel were raided by the constables. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| ead09ad | Versailles has only existed for seven years. It does not have any ancient traditions. It was made by Colbert, the commoner. It is full of nobles, true; but you fool yourself if you believe that they feel comfortable there -- feel as if they belong. No, it is you, mademoiselle, who are the perfect courtier of Versailles, you whom the others shall envy, once you go there and establish yourself. My father feels himself slipping down, sees his .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 387a7d1 | Don`t promise me forever, just love me day by day. | Alexander Rybak | ||
| ed0b6f3 | Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches--and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6984558 | But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9996da2 | What else can you tell us about this batna, Surendranath?" "I learnt it from English traders in Surat," said the befuddled Surendranath, "It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cba2815 | But even if they did have that kind of money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend their native frugality. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3c96fd4 | I don't think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It's because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives. | youth | Neal Stephenson |