Neal Stephenson Quotes

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in ano...

It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was i...

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass,...

He walked straight out of college into the waiting arms of the Navy. They gave him an intelligence t...

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they w...

I don’t think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It’s because they have nothi...

Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself fr...

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human bein...

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and somet...

This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get ...

World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, a...

If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules

...crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a table top. These could have...

The mysterious Enoch Root meets 8-year-old Benjamin Franklin, Boston, 1713: "Do I look like a school...

You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the ...

Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not ...

To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching with...

His baseline attitude toward humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was ...

What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see ...

Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confus...

We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a h...

So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent ...

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the b...

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal be...

Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.There were other reasons for it b...

We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.

Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's prova...

Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

I just saved your fucking life, Mom...It's like, if you--people of a certain age--would make some ef...

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big ol...

It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed...

Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlanti...

I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.

Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to ...

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon...

A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. Th...

It is a second-generation Seattle-scene record label; all of its artists are young people who came t...

think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew somet...

Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relati...

See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can...

But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s ...

What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decide...

every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infi...

In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you in...

The windows on the Dovetail side of the gatehouse were larger, and she could see the two corgi dogs ...

Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding,...

Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a detailed discussion of recent events,...

It had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each ot...

Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong ass...

Right, by tomorrow morning everyone will have congregated in Le Havre and you can all pile in the ca...

Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d’avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, ...

Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, ...

I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime distr...

If you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe - to s...

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor.

... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when ...

Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.

Persons of quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in...

He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal ...

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor....

[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by ...

Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of cu...

The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on...

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or el...

An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed i...

Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you wan...

. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natu...

The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understandin...

The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If t...

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, cert...

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees n...

Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else...

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will ...

How slow can a mammal be and still have respiratory functions?

Gold is the corpse of value...

This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right...

He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his earl...

Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. ...

That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subcultur...

And so from then onwards, Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not ...

And yet all the gold is in England, it is dug up from Portuguese and Spanish mines, but it flows by ...

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he c...

How does a poor country defeat rich ones?” “Indeed, the answer is not by acquiring wealth in the sen...

In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to ment...

Men believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who ...