Neal Stephenson Quotes
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Richard’s ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn’t enjoy that last cigarette.
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I don't like sewing machines. I don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.
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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.
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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?
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'He told us that a lone avout was being pursued by a mob. We saw it as an emergence.'
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Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes. He did not, in other words, leave a lot of breaks in his testimony to allow for discussion. For the moment, that was fine, since it made it easier for Richard to drink.
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I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.
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Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course)... which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours: Notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines...untoward spikes in commodity prices.
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'Sangamon’s Principle,' I said. 'The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide-a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol-nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.''So?''Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.'
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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').