“ If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That’s the whole point of math. Neal Stephenson
“ I see there are no heroes any more. Where is my head of Joseph Kony on a plate? Slice him thinly so there’s enough to go around. Neal Stephenson
“ I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I’d rather be miserable than stupid. I am… Neal Stephenson
“ I gotta say this, Scott says as the guy is sitting on his new bike, getting his swords adjusted, doing something incredibly unauthorized to the bios, you look like one bad motherfucker. Neal Stephenson
“ I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I’m almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension. I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore.… Neal Stephenson
“ Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her parentslived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made more moneythan many college professors. But the class… Neal Stephenson
“ Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned. Neal Stephenson
“ He was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn’t want things to get snarky this early in the meeting. Neal Stephenson
“ He overrides the warning buzzer, jams the stereo over to Taxiscan, which cruises all the taxi-driver frequencies listening for interesting traffic. Can't understand a fucking word. You could buy tapes… Neal Stephenson
“ Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machine—grammar—controls everything else. If y… Neal Stephenson
“ For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little… Neal Stephenson
“ Even the word ‘science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut' or ‘to separate.' The same root led to the word ‘shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. T… 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
“ Clyde had a theory that women had a book, a homemade, photocopied three-ring binder called Surprising Things to Do in a Relationship, which they passed around to one another, adding pages from time to… Neal Stephenson
“ Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he’d purged all the people he did consider dangerous. Wit… Neal Stephenson
“ But when I tried to meet her eye now, she pointedly looked away, and fixed her red and swollen eyes on the big stained-glass window above the slate. Since (a) it was dark outside and (b) the window de… 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
“ But that’s bullshit! Doug says. Jesus! Haven’t you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can’t you recognize bullshit? Don’t you think it would be a useful item to add to your intell… Neal Stephenson
“ 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
