Top 100 Neal Stephenson Quotes
#1. 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
#2. For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.
Neal Stephenson
#3. The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you'd just hate to disappoint her.
Neal Stephenson
#4. It was humanly impossible to extend to seven billion people the full sympathy that each of them deserved.
Neal Stephenson
#5. It was more likely that they would lose consciousness from the gee forces first - a relatively painless way to go.
Neal Stephenson
#6. In the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations.
Neal Stephenson
#7. The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.
Neal Stephenson
#8. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here.
The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.
Neal Stephenson
#9. As soon as you open the door wide enough to admit pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, you have let in all of those other possibilities as well.
Neal Stephenson
#10. In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
Neal Stephenson
#11. Edzard screamed at the men on the starboard side, threatening to throw them overboard if they didn't match the pace of the port team.
Neal Stephenson
#12. Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value.
Neal Stephenson
#13. Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.
Neal Stephenson
#14. Semper Fidelis
Dawn star flares on disk of night
I fall, sun rises
Neal Stephenson
#15. Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.
Neal Stephenson
#16. She just didn't think it decent to live in a place where there were no coffee shops to have breakfast in when she woke up,
Neal Stephenson
#17. Morse code didn't leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she'd just had with Rufus.
Neal Stephenson
#18. Gratitude and obedience. At The Frogs, the relationship between a knight and the people was clearly understood.
Neal Stephenson
#19. He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion. And she, maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't. Hiro
Neal Stephenson
#20. Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable.
Neal Stephenson
#21. I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.
Neal Stephenson
#22. But one of the responsibilities of leadership is to mask one's own fears, to project confidence at all times.
Neal Stephenson
#23. Now there are many Shaftoes - mostly in Tennessee - but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler.
Neal Stephenson
#25. Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life.
Neal Stephenson
#26. I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous.
Neal Stephenson
#27. I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and clothing.
Neal Stephenson
#28. This is how it's done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up - sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your slab of granite that year - but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big.
Neal Stephenson
#29. Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
Neal Stephenson
#30. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
Neal Stephenson
#31. 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
#32. Enoch ... why are you here?
Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical bodi in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?
Neal Stephenson
#34. 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
#35. Many a ship's officer, caught in a storm or battle, and seized by a natural tendency to freeze up in terror, was moved to action by the vivid helplessness of his crew.
Neal Stephenson
#36. My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to
Neal Stephenson
#37. But I have to warn you that this is the word - 'politics' - that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.
Neal Stephenson
#38. 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
#39. And he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover.
Neal Stephenson
#40. They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
Neal Stephenson
#41. So far I have felt like a very inept slapstick performer." "Inept slapstick? Isn't that a bit redundant?
Neal Stephenson
#42. All she knew was that a large strawberry-blond man suddenly appeared in her shop, intent on hugging her. This was unusual. To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been the kind of place for surprise visits. Larz
Neal Stephenson
#44. Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
Neal Stephenson
#45. remember that "layman" is just a polite word for "idiot.
Neal Stephenson
#46. Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers.
Neal Stephenson
#47. from a hundred to a hundred and fifty kilometers, depending on how fat you were and whether
Neal Stephenson
#48. The insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness.
Neal Stephenson
#49. People are my books," Ty said. "But I did bring a couple, in case the people all go to sleep.
Neal Stephenson
#50. Once again, that startled, wary look. "I'm treating you to coffee," he said. That
Neal Stephenson
#51. Unfortunately, this category of secret is itself so secret that it's very existance is secret, and he can't actually reveal it to anyone.
Neal Stephenson
#53. I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.
Neal Stephenson
#54. There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
Neal Stephenson
#55. Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm.
Neal Stephenson
#56. No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive.
Neal Stephenson
#57. Orolo said, What if these two universes - each as big and as old and as complicated as ours - were entirely separate, except for a single photon that managed to travel somehow between them. Would that be enough to wrench A's time and B's time into perfect lockstep for all eternity?
Neal Stephenson
#58. 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.
Neal Stephenson
#59. She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed -- not a polite 'atchoo' but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action.
Neal Stephenson
#60. To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other
Neal Stephenson
#61. Dawn is slapping her chapped and reddened fingers against a frostbitten sky,
Neal Stephenson
#62. The same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom.
Neal Stephenson
#64. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today.
Neal Stephenson
#65. 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
#66. The first woman who spent any amount of time aboard this ship was Elizabeth de Obregon, whom we salvaged from the wrack of the Manila Galleon at the same time as him who burned it, one Edouard de Gex."
"He's dead, by the way."
"Again? I am glad to hear it.
Neal Stephenson
#68. Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be - or to be indistinguishable from - self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
Neal Stephenson
#69. Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell
Neal Stephenson
#70. Tekla wanted to slap her so much that her hand actually twitched.
Neal Stephenson
#71. The suit's got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn't affect your hearing, but it does.
Neal Stephenson
#72. They were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them.
Neal Stephenson
#73. 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
#74. A more down-to-earth project run by the Soviets had determined that eight square meters of algae - an expanse of pond scum about the size of two ping-pong tables - was needed to keep a single human supplied with oxygen.
Neal Stephenson
#75. Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted
organisms
like me
are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we
were before.
Neal Stephenson
#76. Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me.
Neal Stephenson
#77. If it's wearing red, yellow, or both, it's a lama," he said. "Bow to it.
Neal Stephenson
#78. And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.
Neal Stephenson
#79. He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn't consider it worthy of an extended answer.
Neal Stephenson
#80. if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day. RAVENSCAR:
Neal Stephenson
#81. Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
#83. The meeting would later be known as the Council of the Seven Eves.
Neal Stephenson
#84. How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
Neal Stephenson
#85. If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society,
Neal Stephenson
#86. What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?
Neal Stephenson
#87. the question hung there like an invisible wall of flatulence
Neal Stephenson
#88. It is what you don't expect ... that most needs looking for.
Neal Stephenson
#89. He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance.
Neal Stephenson
#90. some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic.
Neal Stephenson
#91. Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.
Neal Stephenson
#92. What is your name?" Ariane asked him. The kid put up his deflector screens and said, "Einstein." Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer.
Neal Stephenson
#93. Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder's torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence.
Neal Stephenson
#94. 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
#95. GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.
Neal Stephenson
#96. Hot and pulsing on the edge of a dynastic rebellion, like the arteries of an old man about to have his first orgasm in years. He
Neal Stephenson
#97. Why do they believe that?" "Because we are hackers," Csongor said, "and they have seen movies.
Neal Stephenson
#98. Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be.
Neal Stephenson
#99. 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
#100. To him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.
Neal Stephenson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
