Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.
Neal StephensonEnoch...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 StephensonUntil a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Neal Stephenson"Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know." "Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer. "At the place weโre going, you need to watch your manners. Donโt say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'" "Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said. Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm.
Neal StephensonBut 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 StephensonSouthern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
Neal StephensonA lot of secular, modern people claim to be disillusioned whenever they learn that any smart person is religious. That's applicable to Newton as it is to any other religious smart person
Neal StephensonThe only thing that can effect a big change in personality is something that physically rewires the brain and/or alters the body's chemical milieu.
Neal StephensonWe are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
Neal StephensonLike 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 StephensonThey knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
Neal StephensonI try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It's recent enough that it is easy to read - easier than Elizabethan English - but it's pre-Victorian and so doesn't have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.
Neal StephensonI was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.
Neal StephensonHaving a persistent nature is part of being human. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to speak of knowing another person, or loving them, or being their friend or enemy or rival.
Neal StephensonMen 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 StephensonThat to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.
Neal Stephenson[Regarding] the soul, I'm a little wary of any discourse on that topic that pretends to have an answer, so I tend to keep my musings to myself. There is interesting, legitimate metaphysical work on the topic going at least as far back as Leibniz and continuing today, following the theme that consciousness, or at least computation, might be at least as fundamental as phenomena such as space, time, energy, and matter, which are the usual subject matter of physics. I follow that sort of thing with interest but with very modest expectations that answers will be arrived at during my lifetime.
Neal StephensonJad said, "The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters." Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.
Neal StephensonHe 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 StephensonFor 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 StephensonCrappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.
Neal StephensonI just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.
Neal StephensonThe 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 StephensonThe 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 StephensonShe looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave
Neal StephensonSo a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.
Neal StephensonBut I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.
Neal StephensonWhen you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
Neal StephensonWait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thingโis it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?
Neal StephensonThe hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Neal StephensonAm I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?
Neal StephensonWhenever I get distracted or bored, my eyes wander over to that chalkboard and I read the words. Some of them grow on me, and others annoy me. I attack the latter with eraser and chalk, and keep nudging at them until I like the way they look and sound. Others never make the cut at all and simply get erased. Perhaps one day I will sell these on eBay to RPG players who need names for characters or alien races.
Neal StephensonI feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.
Neal StephensonSoftware development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
Neal StephensonMost 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 StephensonThe GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richardโs unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.
Neal StephensonHiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.
Neal StephensonConstable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.
Neal StephensonMost 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 StephensonEarly 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 StephensonWhat are letters?โ โKinda like mediaglyphics except theyโre all black, and theyโre tiny, they donโt move, theyโre old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use โem to make short words for long words.
Neal StephensonThe story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And 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 StephensonVirtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.
Neal Stephenson