Neal Stephenson Quotes

152 Sourced Quotes

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Neal Stephenson
Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us.

Neal Stephenson
One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.

Neal Stephenson
I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.

Neal Stephenson
As a fantasy writer, he was not highly regarded (one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground, so derivative that the reader loses track of who he's ripping off, to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements).

Neal Stephenson
In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample.
And sometimes the gloves melt.

Neal Stephenson
The opening screen of T'Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.

Neal Stephenson
This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn't have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn't necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn't need to get involved.

Neal Stephenson
There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth…

Neal Stephenson
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times.... Boston University, where I did my Master's … most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors.

Neal Stephenson
If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?

Neal Stephenson
Interesting things happen along borders - transitions - not in the middle where everything is the same.

Neal Stephenson
As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.

Neal Stephenson
Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.

Neal Stephenson
Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

Neal Stephenson
If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

Neal Stephenson
If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society,

Neal Stephenson
I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.

Neal Stephenson
Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.

Neal Stephenson
Middle class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.

Neal Stephenson
The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it

Neal Stephenson
It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

Neal Stephenson
It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

Neal Stephenson
Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.

Neal Stephenson
But he was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn't bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone's well-meaning efforts to educate him—and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most people.

Neal Stephenson
The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.

Neal Stephenson
The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness

Neal Stephenson
I don't think you are actually retired, Corvallis pointed out mildly.…
It's a selective retirement, Richard explained, a retirement from boring shit.
I think that's called a promotion.

Neal Stephenson
Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

Neal Stephenson
But in that we started so many things in that moment, we brought to their ends many others that have been the subject matter of this account, and so here is where I draw a line across the leaf and call it the end.

Neal Stephenson