American Novels

"Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?"

"So the party was divided into three parts all the time: those in the living room listening to the hi-fi or thumbing through books, those in the yard eating and listening to the guitar music, and those on the hilltop in the shack brewing pots of tea and sitting crosslegged discussing poetry and things and the Dharma or wandering around in the high meadow to to go see the children fly kites or old ladies ride by on horseback. Every weekend was the same mild picnic, a regular classical scene of angels and dolls having a kind of flowery time in the void..."

"Maybe I'll be rich and work and make a lot of money and live in a big house." But a minute later: "And who wants to enslave himself to a lot of all that, though?"

""Pray tell us, good buddy, and don't make it muddy, who played this trick, on Harry and Dick, and why is so mean, this Eternal Scene, just what's the point, of this whole joint?" I thought maybe I could find out at last from these Dharma Bums."

"Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye: they're not hurting anyone"

"See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures."

"By God, you're right, all those sedentary bums sitting around on pillows hearing the cry of a triumphant mountain smasher, they don't deserve it."

"Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization."

"When I was a little kid in Oregon I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom."

"Then I added "Blah," with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world."

"Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said, "God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or another.""

"It was the realer-than-life Japhy of my dreams, and he stood there saying nothing. "Go away, thieves of the mind!" he cried down the hollows of the unbelievable Cascades."

"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round. "Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction. They're not headed our way anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. "Correction. No boat."

"Hiro knows one thing: The Metaverse has now become a place where you can get killed. Or at least have your brain reamed out to the point where you might as well be dead…Guns have come to Paradise. It serves them right, he realizes now. They made the place too vulnerable. They figured that the worst thing that could happen was that a virus might get transferred into your computer… The Metaverse is wide open and undefended, like airports in the days before bombs and metal detectors, like elementary schools in the days before maniacs with assault rifles. There are no cops. You can't defend yourself, you can't chase the bad people. It's going to take a lot of work to change that — a fundamental rebuilding of the whole Metaverse, carried out on a planetwide, corporate level."

"The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. ... This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It's the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal."

"The powerless life raft, sloshing around the North Pacific, emits a vast, spreading plume of steam like that of an Iron Horse chugging full blast over the Continental Divide. Neither Hiro nor Eliot ever mentions, or even notices, the by-now-obvious fact that Fisheye is traveling with a small, self-contained nuclear power source.... As long as Fisheye refuses to notice this fact, it would be rude for them to bring it up."

"There are four men in the life raft:"

"So I’m well aware that there are certain people frustrated with the endings of my books. I can remember at the time I was writing it, I told a friend of mine that the climax of Snow Crash was now longer than Moby-Dick: There’s a helicopter that gets brought down; there’s a private jet that blows up; some people die; there’s confrontation and a girl goes home with her mom — so it seems like a good ending to me. [audience laughter] Once you write a book or two with controversial endings — and that meme gets going, of “Stephenson can’t write endings” — then that gets slapped on everything that you do no matter how elaborate the ending is."

"Such a world wouldn't be stable unless each little "burbclave" had the ability to defend itself from all external threats. This is not plausible, barring some huge advances in defensive technology."

"The idea of a "virtual reality" such as the Metaverse is by now widespread in the computer-graphics community and is being implemented in a number of different ways. The particular vision of the Metaverse as expressed in this novel originated from idle discussion between me and Jaime (Captain Bandwidth) Taaffe — which does not imply that blame for any of the unrealistic or tawdry aspects of the Metaverse should be placed on anyone but me. The words "avatar" (in the sense used here) and "Metaverse" are my inventions, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as "virtual reality") were simply too awkward to use. [...] after the first publication of 'Snow Crash' I learned that the term "avatar" has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a virtual reality system called "Habitat" [...] in addition to avatars, Habitat includes many of the basic features of the Metaverse as described in this book."

"This book germinated in a collaboration between me and the artist Tony Sheeder, the original goal of which was to publish a computer-generated graphic novel. In general, I handled the words and he handled the pictures; but even though this work consists almost entirely of words, certain aspects of it stem from my discussions with Tony…I became intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Macintosh during the early phases…when it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept."

""Send someone out to pick up the abandoned pizza car. And give the driver a day off," Uncle Enzo says. The lieutenant looks somewhat taken aback that Uncle Enzo is concerning himself with such a tiny detail. It is as if the don were going up and down highways picking up litter or something. But he nods respectfully, having just learned something: details matter."

"They have shut down the airport. This was easy to do: they just pulled Lincoln Town Cars onto all the runways, for starters, and then went into the control tower and announced that in a few minutes they would be going to war. Now, LAX is probably quieter than it has been at any point since it was built. Uncle Enzo can actually hear the faint crashing of surf on the beach, half a mile away. It is almost pleasant here. Weenie-roasting weather."

"As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise."

"Fido comes out of his doggie house, curls his long legs beneath him, and jumps over the fence around his yard before he has remembered that he is not capable of jumping over it. This contradiction is lost on him, though; as a dog, introspection is not one of his strong points."

"Their eyes meet and her heart starts flopping around weakly, like a bunny in a Ziploc bag."

"Another man duck-walks across the flight deck… "Hello, everyone," he says cheerfully. "Who are you?" Tony says. The new guy looks crestfallen. "Greg Ritchie," he says. Then, when no one seems to react, he jogs their memory. "President of the United States." "Oh! Sorry. Nice to meet you, Mr. President," Tony says, extending his hand.... "Frank Frost," Frank says, extending his hand and looking bored. "Don't mind me," Y.T. says, when Ritchie looks her way. "I'm a hostage.""

"Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan…After a few thousand years, one new language developed — Hebrew — that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, radical monotheists, were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history — a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.'"

"We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information."

""We would all like to know what the hell is going on," Mr. Lee says. His English is almost devoid of a Chinese accent; clearly his cute, daffy public image is just a front."

"What kind of combat environment do you want to use Reason in?" Ng says. "I need to take over an aircraft carrier tomorrow morning."

"The [CGI] cigarette smoke swirls in the air ostentatiously. It takes as much computing power realistically to model the smoke coming out of Ng's mouth as it does to model the weather system of the entire planet."

""Yes, sir," she says. "Is this in regard to sales or customer service?" "Customer service." "Whom are you with?" "You name it, I'm with them." "I'm sorry?" Like human receptionists, the daemon is especially bad at handling irony. "At the moment, I think I'm working for the Central Intelligence Corporation, the Mafia, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong." "I see," says the receptionist, making a note. Also like a human receptionist, it is not possible to impress her."

"He's got something written on his forehead: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Which is kind of scary. Sexy, too. This guy is the first person she's seen around this place who really looks like he belongs on the Raft."

"All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice…With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be."

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world…If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken."

"It's like, if you — people of a certain age — would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."

"If you ever find yourself in the presence of a destructive force powerful enough to decapsulate those isotopes," Ng says, "radiation sickness will be the least of your worries."

""Ah, this is good," Ng says. "A place where the young men gather to take drugs." Y.T. rolls her eyes at this display of tubularity. This must be the guy who writes all those antidrug pamphlets they get at school. Like he's not getting a million gallons of drugs every second through all of those gross tubes."

"Like all Sacrifice Zones, this one has a fence around it, with yellow metal signs wired to it every few yards: SACRIFICE ZONE WARNING. The National Parks Service has declared this area to be a National Sacrifice Zone. The Sacrifice Zone Program was developed to manage parcels of land whose clean-up cost exceeds their total future economic value. And like all Sacrifice Zone fences, this one has holes in it and is partially torn down in places. Young men blasted out of their minds on natural and artificial male hormones must have some place to do their idiotic coming-of-age rituals."

"Who worshipped Asherah?" "Everyone who lived between India and Spain, from the second millennium B.C. up into the Christian era. With the exception of the Hebrews, who only worshipped her until the religious reforms." "I thought the Hebrews were monotheists…." "Monolatrists. They did not deny the existence of other gods…Asherah was venerated as the consort of Yahweh." "I don't remember anything about God having a wife in the Bible." "The Bible didn't exist at that point. Judaism was just a loose collection of Yahwistic cults, each with different shrines and practices."

"Ng's Metaverse home is a French colonial villa in the prewar village of My Tho in the Mekong Delta. Visiting him is like going to Vietnam in about 1955, except that you don't have to get all sweaty. Somewhere in this house a radio is going, playing a mix of Vietnamese loungy type stuff and Yank wheelchair rock. "Are you a Nova Sicilia citizen?" Ng says. "No. I just chill sometimes with Uncle Enzo and the other Mafia dudes." "Ah…Very unusual." Ng is not a man in a hurry."

""What is the nam-shub of Enki?" Hiro says. The Librarian stares off into the distance and clears his throat dramatically. "Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion, There was no hyena, there was no lion, There was no wild dog, no wolf, There was no fear, no terror, Man had no rival. In those days, the land Shubur-Hamazi, Harmony-tongued Sumer, the great land of the me of princeship, Uri, the land having all that is appropriate, The land Martu, resting in security, The whole universe, the people well cared for, To Enlil in one tongue gave speech. Then the lord defiant, the prince defiant, the king defiant, Enki, the lord of abundance, whose commands are trustworthy, The lord of wisdom, who scans the land, The leader of the gods, The lord of Eridu, endowed with wisdom, Changed the speech in their mouths, put contention into it, Into the speech of man that had been one.”"

""There is no provable genetic relationship between Sumerian and any tongue that came afterward," the Librarian says… "Okay. Does anyone understand Sumerian?" Hiro says. "Yes, at any given time, it appears that there are roughly ten people in the world who can read it." "Where do they work?" "One in Israel. One at the British Museum. One in Iraq. One at the University of Chicago. One at the University of Pennsylvania. And five at Rife Bible College in Houston, Texas." "Nice distribution.”"

""Would Sumerian sound anything like glossolalia?" "Judgment call. Ask someone real," the Librarian says."

"Do you believe in Jesus?" Hiro says. "Yes. But not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus." "How can you be a Christian without believing in that?" "I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?"

"Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing — is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

"But there have been several efforts to deliver us from the hands of primitive, irrational religion. The first was made by someone named Enki about four thousand years ago. The second was made by Hebrew scholars in the eighth century B.C. ... but eventually it just devolved into empty legalism. Another attempt was made by Jesus — that one was hijacked by viral influences within fifty days of his death. The virus was suppressed by the Catholic Church, but we're in the middle of a big epidemic that started in Kansas in 1900 and has been gathering momentum ever since."

""No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto…. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees…. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks …. The only ones left in the city are street people…immigrants…young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood…. Young, smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it."

"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 lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane…."