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...
The difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.
The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from livi...
The barriers placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon, breaking the Nipponese Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking the Coral naval attache machine cipher, breaking Unnamed Nipp...
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...
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed 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...
That is the kind of beauty I was trying to get you to see, Orolo told me. Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defens...
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. T...
So it's not an architectural masterpiece. When Da5id and Hiro and the other hackers wrote The Black Sun, they didn't have enough money to hire architects or designers, so they just went in for simple...
So it was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little p...
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the sa...
Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here a...
She was going to get to stay alive. At the same time, she and the others got very little information from the planet, and had to piece things together from a jumble of clues. She'd compared notes on...
Shaftoe opens his eyes just as the tarp is being peeled back from the open top of the truck. He stares straight up into a blue Italian sky torn around the edges by the scrabbling branches of desperate...
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
Sarah’s entrance, several minutes before the start of the lecture, had thrown Casimir into a titanic intellectual struggle. He now had to decide whether or not to say hi to her.
Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselv...
Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fir...
Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us t...
Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, in...