Neal Stephenson Quotes

“I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.”

— Neal Stephenson

“It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.”

— Neal Stephenson

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

— Neal Stephenson

“I beg your pardon? Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you're talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?”

— Neal Stephenson

Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.

— Neal Stephenson

“I mean, who wants to be the fucking goddess of macrame?”

— Neal Stephenson

“Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Her skirts, sleeves, collar, and hat saw to it that none of the young ruffians of the Leased Territories would have the opportunity to invade her body space with their eyes, and lest her distinctive face prove too much of a temptation, she wore a veil too ...
The veil offered Nell protection from unwanted scrutiny. Many New Atlantis career women also used the veil as a way of meeting the world on their own terms, ensuring that they were judged on their own merits and not on their appearance. It served a protective function as well, bouncing back the harmful rays of the sun and intercepting many deleterious nanosites that might otherwise slip unhindered into the nose and mouth.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.”

— Neal Stephenson

The universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organised anomalies. Hackworth had once taken his family out rowing on the pond in the park, and the ends of the yellow oars spun off compact vortices, and Fiona, who had taught herself the physics of liquids through numerous experimental beverage spills and in the bathtub, demanded an explanation for these holes in water. She leaned over the gunwale, Gwendolyn holding the sash of her dress, and felt those vortices with her hands, wanting to understand them. The rest of the pond, simply water in no particular order, was uninteresting.

— Neal Stephenson

You mentioned ... one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What ... is the other?"
"The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?

— Neal Stephenson

Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is true ... but ... er ... I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!

— Neal Stephenson

“
after that it's just a chase scene.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value
seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does
it is a shared phant'sy.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document.”

— Neal Stephenson

“You have responsibilities, now, Bob. You must lose this naive understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he dies.”

— Neal Stephenson

“By outward appearances, Cantabrigia Five was a video journalist. But it made sense that, in a world where no police or military action could be judged successful unless it looked good to ordinary persons watching it on video screens, she was also a general.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes.”

— Neal Stephenson

“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

“Now this was like trying to comprehend all the activity of an anthill, and read all the words in a book, and feel all the splendor of a cathedral, in one glance. Jack's mind was not equal to the demands that Cairo placed on it, and so for a long while he fixed his attention on small and near matters, as if he were a boy peering through a hollow reed.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Most of the people around the entrance were, of course, bellhops and taxi drivers. Guests went in and out. Some were dressed in business suits, others in casual tourist attire. He did not see any commandos in tracksuits.”

— Neal Stephenson

Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her-disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms-cancers reabsorbed-(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion.

— Neal Stephenson

“Kids who are obsessed with locks frequently turn into adults who are obsessed with crypto.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That's how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward to another generation on another continent. Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

Judge Fang got to eat this way only when someone really important was trying to taint him, and though he had never knowingly allowed his judicial judgment to be swayed, he did enjoy the chow.

— Neal Stephenson

“There is no honour among consultants.”

— Neal Stephenson

“If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you call it?" "Hmmm," Waterhouse says. "Well, its basic job is to perform mathematical calculations-like a computer." Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being." "Well . . . this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I suppose you could call it a digital computer." Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL COMPUTER.”

— Neal Stephenson

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist's mind before he or she begins to do science.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The Præsidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an octagon, and not far above that, the octagon became a sixteen-sided polygon, and above that it became round. The roof of the Præsidium was a disk, or rather a lens, as it bulged up slightly in the middle to shed rainwater. It supported the megaliths, domes, penthouses, and turrets of the starhenge, which drove, and was driven by, the same clock-works that ran the dials.”

— Neal Stephenson

“These Burbclaves! These citystates!
So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like not mowing your
lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue.”

— Neal Stephenson

“But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.”

— Neal Stephenson

“What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A
better football team?"
"Better me."
"What are me?"
"Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws,
but on a more fundamental level."
"I don't get it."
"That is the point. Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the
same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally
different consciousness from ours.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Maybe that's what a leader is, Dinah. The one person who can't-who shouldn't-share her problems with anyone else.”

— Neal Stephenson

“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

Sometimes, she worries about her mother, then she hardens her heart and thinks maybe the whole thing will be good for her. Shake her up a little. Which is what she needs. After Dad left, she just folded up into herself like an origami bird thrown into a fire. There

— Neal Stephenson

“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

“One sort of glib explanation I heard once was that Rhetors could change the past, and were glad to do it, but Incanters could change the future-and were reluctant.”

— Neal Stephenson

The terminator-not the robotic assassin of moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet incessantly rotates.

— Neal Stephenson

“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

“I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.”

— Neal Stephenson

“But the only feature of the view that ever changed was the signatures of foam deposited on the beach by the waves. Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own runup onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start, but each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of grey foam and got buried underneath the next.”

— Neal Stephenson

“His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his general disorientation that did them in.”

— Neal Stephenson

Crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a table top. These could have been mistaken for the trade tools of a cook, physician, or torturer, save for the fact that the surface on which they rested was a slab of polished pink marble, topping a white and gilt dressing table-cum-sculpture, done up in the new, hyper-Baroque style named Rococo. It was adorned, for example, with several cherubs, bows drawn, eyes asquint, as they drew beads on unseen targets, butt cheeks polished to a luster with jeweler's rouge. It had, in other words, all the earmarks of a gift that had been sent to the princess by someone with a lot of money who did not know her very well.

— Neal Stephenson

Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.

— Neal Stephenson

“It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn't working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.”

— Neal Stephenson

“It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.”

— Neal Stephenson