Neal Stephenson Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.

  Neal Stephenson

  Believe, Men, Different

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, Made, Certain

  Neal Stephenson (2010). “Anathem”, p.64, Atlantic Books Ltd

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Oxygen, Atmosphere, Trying

  "In the Kindom of Mao Bell" by Neal Stephenson, www.wired.com. February 1, 1994.

  60 Copy quote

• The best way to know someone is to have a conversation with them.

  Neal Stephenson

  Way, Conversation, Best Way

  Neal Stephenson (2012). “Cryptonomicon”, p.382, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dirty, Knives, Two

  Neal Stephenson (2011). “Reamde”, p.313, Atlantic Books Ltd

  5 Copy quote

• I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.

  Neal Stephenson

  Dirt, Consideration, Pursuit

  Neal Stephenson (1994). “Snow Crash”, p.481, Penguin UK

  7 Copy quote

• Gold is the corpse of value.

  Neal Stephenson

  Gold, Corpses, Values

  "Cryptonomicon". Book by Neal Stephenson, 1999.

  11 Copy quote

• Boredom is a mask frustration wears.

  Neal Stephenson

  Frustration, Boredom, Mask

  10 Copy quote

• All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.

  Neal Stephenson

  Cells, People, Brain

  Neal Stephenson (2003). “Snow Crash”, p.201, Spectra

  7 Copy quote

• He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.

  Neal Stephenson

  Believe, Men, People

  Neal Stephenson (2003). “The Diamond Age”, p.20, Spectra

  4 Copy quote

• One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.

  Neal Stephenson

  People, Scary, Nerd

  Neal Stephenson (2012). “Cryptonomicon”, p.646, Random House

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Self, Issues

  Neal Stephenson (2009). “Cryptonomicon”, p.5, Harper Collins

  10 Copy quote

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

  Neal Stephenson

  Sports, Men, Years

  Neal Stephenson (2003). “Snow Crash”, p.56, Spectra

  5 Copy quote

• The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

  Neal Stephenson

  Book, Night, Light

  Neal Stephenson (2003). “Snow Crash”, p.1, Spectra

  9 Copy quote

• One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.

  Neal Stephenson

  Girlfriend, Jobs, Reading

  Neal Stephenson (2007). “Zodiac”, p.10, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  5 Copy quote

• When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.

  Neal Stephenson

  Reading, Communication, Loss

  10 Copy quote

• Any strategy that involves crossing a valley accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

  Neal Stephenson

  Distance, Loss, Valleys

  FaceBook post by Neal Stephenson from Oct 02, 2011

  9 Copy quote

• But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort of compromise between the sphere that is dictated by Euclidean geometry and whatever sunken treasure related shapes that the cereal aestheticians were probably clamoring for, they came up with this hard-to-pin-down striated pillow formation.

  Neal Stephenson

  Suicidal, Cereal, Long

  "Cryptonomicon". Book by Neal Stephenson, 1999.

  11 Copy quote

• ... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.

  Neal Stephenson

  Hammers, Thumbs, Alive

  6 Copy quote

• What are letters?” “Kinda like mediaglyphics except they’re all black, and they’re tiny, they don’t move, they’re old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use ’em to make short words for long words.

  Neal Stephenson

  Moving, Long, Black

  Neal Stephenson (2003). “The Diamond Age”, p.46, Spectra

  14 Copy quote

• Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he'll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas "Fscking" Edison.

  Neal Stephenson

  Shoes, Design, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• ..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

  Neal Stephenson

  Stupid, Cutting, Order

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• Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

  Neal Stephenson

  Badass, Self, Numbers

  4 Copy quote

• Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters.

  Neal Stephenson

  Monsters, Psychological, Certain

  "Neal Stephenson Speaks about His Latest Epic: 'Seveneves'". Interview with David Mitchell, www.amazonbookreview.com. May 21, 2015.

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• A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

  Neal Stephenson

  Clutter, Basements, Universe

  9 Copy quote

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