Neal Stephenson - Place Quotes

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But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.

Neal Stephenson
The expression can be traced to the Third Centennial Apert, when the gates of several Hundreder maths opened to reveal startling outcomes, e. g.: at Saunt Rambalf's, a mass suicide that had taken place only moments earlier. At Saunt Terramore's, nothing at all — not even human remains. At Saunt Byadin's, a previously unheard-of religious sect.... At Saunt Lesper's, no humans, but a previously undiscovered species of tree-dwelling higher primates.

Neal Stephenson
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

Neal Stephenson
Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows and special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored.

Neal Stephenson
Much pruning had taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.

Neal Stephenson
Now he was far from bored but feeling many of the same stresses that had caused him to retire from active duty in the first place. Was it possible to find a station in life with just the right level of interest? Was it possible to be normal without being someone's dupe?

Neal Stephenson
He kept flinching. The low sun shone in the face of a two-hundred-foot-tall wind turbine in the field across the crick, and its blades cast long scything shadows over them. … The sun above blinking on and off with each cut of a blade. … Something about their being in motion, in a place where everything else was almost pathologically still, seized the attention; they always seemed to be jumping out at you from behind corners.

Neal Stephenson
…he had found an image of one of the big Western-style business hotels along the waterfront: one of those places where it was possible to be a white person without attracting one's own personal Stonehenge of cataleptic, openmouthed gapers.

Neal Stephenson
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,

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