Neal Stephenson Books

"Who's the lady in the middle? The Virgin Mary?" Randy asks. Root fingers the medallion without looking at it, and says, "Reasonable guess. But wrong. It's Athena.” "The Greek goddess? How do you square that with Christianity?" "When I phoned you the other day, how did you know it was me?" "I don't know. I just recognized you." "Recognized me? What does that mean? You didn't recognize my voice." "Is this some roundabout way of answering my question?"

"And then there is Dionysus, who isn't even fully a god — he's half human, but gets to be in the Pantheon anyway and sit on Olympus with the Gods, as if you went to the Supreme Court and found Bozo the Clown planted among the justices."

"Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena,” Enoch says. “The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares…Native Americans had tricksters — creatures full of cunning like Coyote and Raven — in their mythologies, but they didn't have technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist god…Cunning people tend to attain power that uncunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them admire it… Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil." "Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers," Randy says. "That's right. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena."

"People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards."

"Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current lines of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role-playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo instantly cross-correlates it to developments in the Nipponese game industry…By the time he's finished, Goto makes them feel like geniuses who were ten years ahead of their time. His English started out minimal and is getting better and better…as if he is slowly dusting off substantial banks of memory and processing power, nursing them on-line like tube amplifiers."

"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo. "I don't understand." "If you want to understand, look out the Window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here—" he points to his head "—in the intelligence of the people, and in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."

"But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build things."

"An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous."

"Enoch Root spends some time alone with Amy and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about it."

"Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news…It did not enter his calculations that being on the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never wants to leave the jungle."

"He threw his long coat down on the sand and sloshed out Into the Pacific, accompanied by the officer, and remained at a judicious distance, partly to show due respect, and partly because Nell had a sword in her waistband. Her face was inclined over the pages of her book like a focusing lens, and he half expected the pages to curl and smoke under her gaze."

"One of the Boers, a wiry grandmother with a white bun on her head and a black bonnet…began to march toward the head of the advancing column of Celestials. She carefully got down on both knees in the middle of the road, clasped her hands together in prayer, and bowed her head. Then she became a pearl of white light in the mouth of the dragon. In an instant this pearl grew to the size of an airship. Carl Hollywood had the presence of mind to close his eyes and turn his head away, but he didn't have time to throw himself down; the shock wave did that."

"They wanted to carry her, but she jumped to the stones of the plaza and strode away from the building, toward her ranks, which parted to make way for her. The streets of Pudong were filled with hungry and terrified refugees, and through them, in simple peasant clothes streaked with the blood of herself and of others, broken shackles dangling from her wrists, followed by her generals and ministers, walked the barbarian Princess with her book and her sword."

"You do these things not to serve your Queen but to serve your own nature, John Hackworth, and I understand your nature. For you cleverness is its own end, and once you have seen a clever way to do a thing, you must do it, as water finding a crack in a dike must pass through it and cover the land on the other side."

"Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is…Western, and completely alien to us. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible…The result has been centuries of chaos. We ask you to end that by giving us the Seed."

"Some people come here because they are on a quest of some sort—trying to find a lost lover, let’s say, or to understand why something terrible happened in their lives, or why there is cruelty in the world, or why they aren’t satisfied with their career. Society has never been good at answering these questions — the sorts of questions you can’t just look up in a reference database."

"He had been born without the ability to blend and socialize as some are born without hands."

"The tiny old houses and flats of this once impoverished quarter had mostly been refurbished into toeholds for young Atlantans from all around the Anglosphere, poor in equity but rich in expectations, who had come to the great city to incubate their careers. The lustre that was so evident near the approaches to the bridge began to wear thin in places, and the ancient character of the neighborhood began to assert itself, as the bones of the knuckles reveal their shape beneath the stretched skin of a fist."

"It was a vast open marketplace with thousands of stalls, filled with carts and runners carrying product in all directions. But no vegetables, fish, spices, or fodder were to be seen here; all the product was information written down in books.... Book-carriers bumped into each other, compared notes as to what they were carrying and where they were going, and swapped books for other books. Stacks of books were sold in great, raucous auctions—and paid for not with gold but with other books. Around the edges of the market were stalls where books were exchanged for gold, and beyond that, a few alleys where gold could be exchanged for food."

""They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward—and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right. It is their view that one day… the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed…. Of course, it can't be allowed…if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destructive power rivaled that of Elizabethan nuclear weapons.”"

"There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have everything they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything."

"What does it really mean when such a young person moves to another phyle? It means that they have outgrown youthful credulity and no longer wish to belong to a tribe simply because it is the path of least resistance—they have developed principle, they are concerned with their personal integrity."

"It was a bit too aggressive to be a reverie and too abstract to be a hallucination."

"“The old guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise their children to believe in that code — but their children believe it for entirely different reasons." "They believe it," the Constable said, "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." "Yes. Some of them never challenge it — they grow up to be small-minded people, who can tell you what they believe, but not why they believe it. Others become disillusioned by the hypocrisy of the society and rebel." "Which path do you intend to take, Nell? Conformity or rebellion?" "Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded — they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.""

"He nodded in the direction of China. "Been doing a bit of consulting work for a gentleman there. Complicated fellow. Dead now. Had many facets, but now he'll go down in history as just another damn Chinese warlord who didn't make the grade. It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shoveling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honour among consultants.""

"I know that you have a secret, Nell, though I cannot imagine what it is, and I know that your secret has made you different from any other girl I have ever taught. I haven't much time left, and we must dispense with what makes you like all the other girls and concentrate on what makes you different."

"She had found that her wits became dull if she got too cozy."

"It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together," Miss Matheson said. "That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. She is like an avatar — do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and well defended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken."

"Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defense. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten. New Atlantis, like many tribes, propagates itself largely through education. That is the raison d'être of this Academy."

"There are many Lesser phyles and three Great ones. "What are the Great ones?" "New Atlantis," Nell began. "Nippon," said Fiona. "Han," they concluded together. "That is correct," Miss Matheson said. "We traditionally include Han in the list because of its immense size and age—even though it has lately been crippled by intestine discord. And some would include Hindustan, while others would view it as a riotously diverse collection of microtribes sintered together according to some formula we don't get."

"It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost — swallowed up in the ocean — unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes."

"They went across the playing fields…the two girls walking and Miss Matheson's wheelchair carrying her along on its many-spoked smart wheels. "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself. "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said. "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid.""

"During her first few weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years."

"As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams."

"“It’s the only punishment that seems to sink in—we employ it with some frequency.” “Then perhaps it is not sinking in as well as you suppose,” Lord Finkle-McGraw said, looking sad and sounding bemused."

"Princess Nell stared out over the waves for a while, then looked Carl in the eye and said quietly, "I accept your credentials and request that you convey my warm thanks and regard to Her Majesty, along with my apologies that circumstances prevent me from composing a more formal response to her kind letter, which at any other time would naturally be my highest priority." "I shall do so at the earliest opportunity, Your Majesty," Carl Hollywood said. Hearing these words, Princess Nell looked a bit unsteady…Carl realized that she had never been addressed in this way before."

"The last foreign devil to depart from the Middle Kingdom was a blond Victorian gentleman with gray eyes, who stood in the waves for some time looking back over Pudong before he turned around and continued his descent. As the sea rose over him, it lifted the bowler from his head, and the hat continued to bob on the tide for some minutes as the Chinese detonated strings of firecrackers on the shore and tiny shreds of the red paper wrappers drifted over the sea like cherry petals."

"New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing."

"There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily."

"This morning [Imelda Marcos] offered the latest in a series of explanations of the billions of dollars that she and her husband, who died in 1989, are believed to have stolen during his presidency. "It so coincided that Marcos had money," she said. "After the Bretton Woods agreement he started buying gold from Fort Knox. Three thousand tons, then 4,000 tons. I have documents for these: 7,000 tons. Marcos was so smart. He had it all. It's funny; America didn't understand him.""

"The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!"

"This ain't just your regular Friday p.m. Shanghai bank district money rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire."

"Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored."

"When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda."

"Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty. This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators."

"Shaftoe thinks that he has never seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone-faced Chinese women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers explode all around them. Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with baby fat and streaked with tears."

"The guy in the corner kept reading poetry. For perhaps ten seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, Shaftoe actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a vicious racial brawl."

"A couple of days into the voyage it becomes apparent that Sergeant Frick has forgotten how to shine his boots.…Now in and of itself this is forgivable. Frick started out his career chasing bandolier-draped desperadoes away from mail trains on the High Chaparral, for God's sake. In '27 he got shipped off to Shanghai on very short notice, and no doubt had to display some adaptability."

"Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the band are up on the deck of the Nevada one morning, playing the national anthem and watching the Stars and Stripes ratchet up the mast, when they are startled to find themselves in the midst of 190 airplanes of unfamiliar design… This is an incredibly realistic training exercise even down to the point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around this place… …Waterhouse is vaguely aware of a lot of stuff coming at him really fast."

"But what if it isn't that clear-cut? What if the action is one that would merely be really improbable unless the Americans were breaking the code? What if the Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky?"