“ The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low… Neal Stephenson
“ The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once you're infected with it, it lives in your brain forever. Neal Stephenson
“ The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared… Neal Stephenson
“ The problem with those honorable men, Avi says, is that they expect everyone else to be honorable in the same way. Neal Stephenson
“ The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests. Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy’s strategy would never work. But then, Cap’n Crunch in a flake… Neal Stephenson
“ The managerthunks down a couple of steps, glares at her, glares at her for rather a longtime. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse of flesh hasbeen ricocheting around in his brain… Neal Stephenson
“ The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning himselfwith such a tiny detail It is as if the don were going up and down highwayspicking up litter or something. But he nods re… Neal Stephenson
“ The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pi… Neal Stephenson
“ The general picture was that Ymir would not be anything like the traditional idea of a spaceship, in the sense of an orderly, symmetrical piece of architecture. It would be more like a flying robotic… Neal Stephenson
“ The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized. Neal Stephenson
“ The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation w… Neal Stephenson
“ The correct way to think about intelligence, in this case, is as a human quality shared by just about everyone, at least until it gets beaten out of us. Not a special gift that is bestowed on only a f… Neal Stephenson
“ The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carv… Neal Stephenson
“ The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this conceptinto English is like translating fuckface into Nipponese, but it mighttranslate into emotional intensity in football lingo.… Neal Stephenson
“ The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip,videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. Itcan even be a joke based on the latest highly public… Neal Stephenson
“ The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S Navy flashlight. In the sotto voce one might use to correct an… Neal Stephenson
“ The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getti… Neal Stephenson
“ 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 c… 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 constitutio… Neal Stephenson
“ The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however—for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free. Neal Stephenson
