Neal Stephenson Quotes

“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

Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young marines on their way to Guadalcanal?"
Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long. The memories are still as fresh as last night's eleventh nighmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!
"Just kill the one with the sword first."
"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction. "Smarrrt
you target them because they're the officers, right?"
"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells. "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?

— Neal Stephenson

“And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.”

— Neal Stephenson

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.

— Neal Stephenson

“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”

— Neal Stephenson

“It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.”

— Neal Stephenson

“But your way isn't just that set of rules," Cord said. "It's who you are - you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you're talking about will sort itself out eventually.”

— Neal Stephenson

Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop.

— Neal Stephenson

You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That's how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin.

— Neal Stephenson

It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.

— Neal Stephenson

For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops."
"The clock stops, you mean."
"No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire's gone out, and the sun's gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-" now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. "Or an opened lock.

— Neal Stephenson

“But what little I'd heard had left me amazed by how clever people were at finding ways to make each other crazy and miserable.”

— Neal Stephenson

“So through no rational process whatsoever I was the leader, And I had no idea what I was going to say.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Donald Cameron has his own character in the world now!? Skeletor exclaimed, in somewhat the same tone of voice as a tribune might have said, Hannibal has crossed the Alps with elephants!?”

— Neal Stephenson

“It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva's hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady suck-and-hiss that's like the systole and diastole of a beating heart.”

— Neal Stephenson

“War did not just level, it plowed the field, raising the muck and sinking the stubble.”

— Neal Stephenson

“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

“Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it-which must have been a great spiritual struggle-and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?”

— Neal Stephenson

“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

The quill swirled and lunged over the page, in a slow but relentless three steps forward, two steps back sort of process and finally came to a full stop in a tiny pool of its own ink. Then, Louis Phelypeaux, First Compte de Pontchartrain, raised the nib, let it hover for an instant, as if gathering his forces, and hurled it backwards along the sentence, tiptoeing over "i's" and slashing through "t's" and "x's" nearly tripping over an umlaut, building speed and confidence while veering through a slalom course of acute and grave accents, pirouetting through cedillas and carving vicious snap-turns through circumflexes. It was like watching the world's greatest fencing master dispatch twenty opponents with a single continuous series of maneuvers.

— Neal Stephenson

“I think I'm in love, she said. He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect." Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. "This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.”

— Neal Stephenson

Sergeant Major," Arjun said quietly, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Yur snorted. "Is that a fancy way of saying it's above my pay grade, sir?

— Neal Stephenson

“The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue-records that tell a consistent story.”

— Neal Stephenson

“If this all seems ambiguous, that's because it is; and if that troubles you, you'd hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.”

— Neal Stephenson

In any soul, the Condemned Man argued, was the ability to create a whole world, as big and variegated as the one that he and the Magistrate lived in. But if this was true of the Innocent, it was true of the Condemned Man as well, and so he should not-no one should ever-be put to death.

— Neal Stephenson

“As I walked back over the bridge, I thought that of all the people I'd talked to today, I was probably the least content in my situation.”

— Neal Stephenson

“If you make certain assumptions about the force of gravity, and how the weight of an object diminishes as it gets farther away, it's not improbable at all," Isaac said. "It just happens. You would keep going round and round forever." "In a circle?" "An ellipse." "An ellipse ... " and here the bomb finally went off in his head, and Daniel had to sit down on the ground, the moisture of last year's fallen apples soaking through his breeches. "Like a planet." "Just so-if only we could jump fast enough, or had a strong enough wind at our backs, we could all be planets.”

— Neal Stephenson

He no longer had an accurate visual memory of the size of the moon in the sky, and so he could not estimate how many times larger the cloud was.

— Neal Stephenson

“Books are the single most efficient technology there is in terms of nimbleness and bang for the buck. You can present a whole universe in a book. It's produced simply by sitting in front of a typewriter or a computer and tapping on keys. There's no real limit to what you can conjure up in the reader's imagination by doing that. The book is irreplaceable.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Fraa Jad took the garment from me and discovered how the fly worked. "Topology is destiny," he said, and put the drawers on.”

— Neal Stephenson

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

“Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.”

— Neal Stephenson

“After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage,”

— Neal Stephenson

“Being in the military is amazing; you give orders, and things happen.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Through the uneven morning mist, she could make out the ruin of the monastery on the northern verge. The broken, roofless walls of outbuildings stretched south of the main ruins in a broken curve. Birches and a few young oaks had grown up where monks had likely once raised vegetables. The rest of the clearing was filled with grass and brambles cut through with newly blazed paths. Four lean-tos had been erected just beyond the stone fence of an overgrown graveyard.”

— Neal Stephenson

“She slammed the book closed, ran to her bed, gathered her stuffed animals up in her arms, started chewing on her blanket, and cried for a while, considering the question of trolls.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Be as affronted as you please, just don't volunteer anything. If you see what appears to be an opening in debate, remember that it was ingeniously laid down in front of you by Bolingbroke as coquettes drop handkerchiefs at the feet of men they would ensnare.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Anyone who made it through the screening and the training required to become an Arkie"-which doesn't include you, Julia-"will understand exactly what we are trying to do from an orbital mechanics standpoint.”

— Neal Stephenson

“What makes you think they're spying on you?" "Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math-Evoked-and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again.”

— Neal Stephenson

“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

“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

“In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.”

— Neal Stephenson

“The story is everything, so it always begins with a story. Research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.”

— Neal Stephenson

“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

“The mind knows ... that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.”

— Neal Stephenson

“At the beginning of the project, I wasn't certain that I could come up with an engaging storyline and cast of characters in this world, so I had a strong bias toward actually writing, and worrying about research later. In other words, I was afraid that I'd devote a year or two of my life to grinding through Kant and Husserl, then discover that there simply was no novel to be written here.”

— Neal Stephenson

“If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

— Neal Stephenson