“ Gratitude and obedience. At The Frogs, the relationship between a knight and the people was clearly understood. Neal Stephenson
“ For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the survival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth,… Neal Stephenson
“ Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone’s half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you’re sunk. Neal Stephenson
“ Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules. Neal Stephenson
“ Even though we didn’t say anything, we were in dialog: a peregrin dialog, meaning two equals wandering around trying to work something out, as opposed to a suvinian dialog where a fid is being taught… Neal Stephenson
“ Emotional intensity doesn't convey the half of it, of course. It is the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The wor… Neal Stephenson
“ Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself—and… Neal Stephenson
“ Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad… Neal Stephenson
“ But thoughts of this sort were chased away by others. One of those moments had arrived: Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being… Neal Stephenson
“ But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Neal Stephenson
“ But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mi… Neal Stephenson
“ But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathemat… Neal Stephenson
“ But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the e… Neal Stephenson
“ At any rate the total number of persons at the table was not enormously larger than the number of categories, meaning that nearly everyone present was reacting in an altogether different way, and in m… Neal Stephenson
“ As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one. Neal Stephenson
“ And he can convert millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus—people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren’t rational… Neal Stephenson
“ Also known as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah,’ or in the original Welsh, ‘Cwm Rhondda,’ added Sonar Taxlaw. Neal Stephenson
“ All the potential emperors are assholes, and they’re all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So Neal Stephenson
“ Academics being no less nomadic than Congregational preachers, he took work where he could find it. He became a Professor of Greek and Latin at Neal Stephenson
