“ But Henry wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep. Neal Stephenson
“ Birth and death, Chet said. The poles of human existence. We're like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mou… Neal Stephenson
“ Between these efforts he sent the following, loosely connected string of comments and observations Bob’s way: You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! Yo… Neal Stephenson
“ Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same. Neal Stephenson
“ Banks used to issue their own currencies. You can see these old banknotes in the Smithsonian. ‘First National Bank of South Bumfuck will remit ten pork bellies to the bearer,’ or whatever. That had to… Neal Stephenson
“ At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently. Neal Stephenson
“ 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 in… Neal Stephenson
“ As the sun went down on the opposite side of the world, the light on the New Jersey horizon focused to a steady, lambent core the color of a flashlight when you shine it through the palm of your hand… Neal Stephenson
“ Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless. Neal Stephenson
“ And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy. Neal Stephenson
“ Americans’ preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I’m not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I’m not even going to make snotty comments about it—after all, I was at Disney… Neal Stephenson
“ Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together—that they ought to be having a discreet… Neal Stephenson
“ All she knew was that a large strawberry-blond man suddenly appeared in her shop, intent on hugging her. This was unusual. To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been… Neal Stephenson
“ All of the questions that had been open when my head had hit the pillow were still pending. But in the intervening hours, my brain had been changing to fit the new shape of my world. I guess that’s wh… Neal Stephenson
“ All of Rommel’s supplies and reinforcements come across those very straits from Italy, and land at Tunis or Bizerta. From there, Rommel can strike out east towards Egypt or west Neal Stephenson
“ After that it had all been oral history for about a thousand years, since there had been no paper to write on and no ink to write on it with. Memory devices were scarce and jury-rigged. Every single c… Neal Stephenson
“ Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had… Neal Stephenson
“ A great deal of effort has been devoted to explaining Babel. Not the Babel event-- which most people consider to be a myth -- but the fact that languages tendto diverge. A number of linguistic theorie… Neal Stephenson
