“ A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance about for some handy swatting material. Neal Stephenson
“ A causal domain is just a collection of things linked by mutual cause-and-effect relationships. But isn’t everything in the universe so linked? Depends on how their light cones are arranged. We can’t… Neal Stephenson
“ A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Neal Stephenson
“ He liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it -- say, in a nice stained-glass window -- not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade. Neal Stephenson
“ When I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of somethi… Neal Stephenson
“ The ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with… Neal Stephenson
“ Scratched out the first few terms of a series: If you sum this series, it will slowly converge on pi. So we have a way to approach the value of pi—to reach toward it, but never to grasp it…much as the… Neal Stephenson
“ It comes out of the fact that during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkwa… Neal Stephenson
“ Flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. —John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine A… Neal Stephenson
“ Spoken like a true Nipponese, Enoch says bitterly. You never change. Please make me understand what you are saying. What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work, because he has no legs? What of… Neal Stephenson
“ Sline: (1) In Fluccish of the late Praxic Age and early Reconstitution, a slang word formed by truncation of baseline, which is a Praxic commercial bulshytt term. It appears to be a noun that turned i… Neal Stephenson
“ She had grown tired of the pouffy floating hair of zero gravity and, after a few weeks of clamping it down with baseball caps, had figured out how to make this shorter cut work for her. The haircut ha… Neal Stephenson
“ Most of the people around the entrance were, of course, bellhops and taxi drivers. Guests went in and out. Some were dressed in business suits, others in casual tourist attire. He did not see any comm… Neal Stephenson
“ Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like X-rays th… Neal Stephenson
“ Ivy passed by the same location a few moments later, slowed for a moment, and glanced down the length of the tube. It was possible to see straight down its length, across the spherical Pod, and throug… Neal Stephenson
“ It would be unseemly for me to beg for your succour so early in this letter, and so I shall divert you (or so I flatter myself) by relating my last conversation with my employer, Peter Romanov, or Pet… Neal Stephenson
“ If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The… Neal Stephenson
“ I hadn’t known that, I said. I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there. There might as well be, Arsibalt said, but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bo… Neal Stephenson
“ Cut, the journalist says, turning into the camera. Just cut. The BabbleBrigade has started up again.The soundtrack now consists of a thousand people speaking in tongues under thehigh-pitched, shit-eat… Neal Stephenson
“ As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Neal Stephenson
