“ The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polishedglass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,this lens emerges and clicks into place, i… Neal Stephenson
“ The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead. Neal Stephenson
“ The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness. Neal Stephenson
“ The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out in… Neal Stephenson
“ The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe.… Neal Stephenson
“ The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the c… Neal Stephenson
“ The only human in evidence was a white-haired Constable whose belly had created a visible divergence between his two rows of brass buttons. He was bent over using a trowel to extract a steaming turd f… Neal Stephenson
“ The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code—but their children believe it for entirely different reasons. They believe it… Neal Stephenson
“ The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2—216 power to be exact—and even the… Neal Stephenson
“ The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did notchange for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like shewas interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral p… Neal Stephenson
“ The expenditure of paper and printer ink had been somewhat lavish. Two generations from now, if any humans survived, they would look on this heap of documents with some combination of disgust and amaz… Neal Stephenson
“ 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… Neal Stephenson
“ The cloud, in other words, became not just a physical cloud of flying objects in space but a computational cloud as well, a free-floating, self-regulating Internet. Neal Stephenson
“ The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders… Neal Stephenson
“ 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… Neal Stephenson
“ The Præsidium stood on four pillars and for most of its height was square in cross-section. Not far above the dials, however, the corners of the square floor-plan were cleaved off, making it into an o… Neal Stephenson
“ THE ROUGH TIMBERS of the monastery wall were aged and warped, and there were numerous gaps and holes in the wood. Covered in pitch, they were a poor defensive barrier, if they had ever been intended a… Neal Stephenson
“ 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… Neal Stephenson
“ Since most hackers are white males, their companies are disaster areas when it comes to diversity, and it follows that all of the diversity must be concentrated in the one or two employees who are not… Neal Stephenson
“ She’s not a shy person. Her body language is eloquent enough: I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physi… Neal Stephenson
