Neal Stephenson Books

"Half a dozen teenagers, boys and girls, were huddled together around the remains of a campfire. As Sokolov approached, one of them rose and staggered down the beach until he felt he had gone far enough to fish out his penis and urinate without giving offense to any female members of his party who might be awake. Sokolov approved of this. He was still pissing, with the enviable vigor of the young, as Sokolov approached within hailing distance. “What is this place?” Sokolov asked him. “This is Golden Gardens Park.” “What is name of city, please?” “Seattle.” “Thanks. Have nice day.” “You too. Take it easy, man.” “Is not my objective. Nice thing to say though. Enjoy piss.”"

"The channel through which these images had reached them was extremely confusing (decryption key pulled out of a dead man’s wallet by a Hungarian in the Philippines communicating with an American in Canada, the conversation taking place on an imaginary planet), and Olivia had to intervene and explain matters. And that was just the Seattle FBI part of it."

"Northward from Spokane the businesses and dwellings stopped feeling like farms and began feeling like outposts. Decidedly eccentric signage began to show up: billboards inveighing against the United Nations, and hand-lettered jeremiads about the existential threat posed by the federal budget deficit. But of course Olivia just noticed those things because she was looking for them; it was mostly fast-food joints and convenience stores like anywhere else in America."

"Olivia cast an eye over the contents of his cart, wondering whether this was totally random stuff, to perfect his Walmart shopper disguise: 5.56-millimeter cartridges, a water purification device, jerky, bug repellent, roll of black plastic sheeting, batteries, camouflage binoculars.… It turned out that Sokolov really did want to buy all that stuff. Not because he envisioned any particular use for it. He just believed in stocking up on such things, on general principles, whenever an opportunity presented itself. He would fit in well here."

"This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing."

"“Why do they believe that?” “Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”"

"This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was."

"“It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!”"

"In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons."

"Uncle Richard, …This is my first damsel-in-distress letter, so I hope I am striking the right tone…"

"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."

"Ha ha noob, you are pwned by troll. I have encrypt all your file. Leave 1000 GP at below coordinates and I give you key"

"“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.”"

"And so it was that Richard had conceived Corporation 9592’s Writers in Residence Program. Years later, he was astounded by the naïveté of it. Writers, as it turned out, rather liked having residences. Once they had moved in, it was nearly impossible to dislodge them."

"The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields. … They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power."

"As a fantasy writer, Skraelin 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…” But he was so freakishly prolific…and prolific was what Richard needed at this point in the game."

""Do you know anything at all about Xiamen?” Zula asked. “It is a curious place,” Csongor said. “Maybe a little like Hungary.” “What does that mean?" “Too many neighbors.”"

"Since her immigration status had become impossible to make sense of, Olivia was met, at the top of the jetway, by a man in a uniform and a man in a suit. She had always read of people being “whisked through” certain formalities, but this was the first time she had ever been personally whisked and she had to admit that it had its charms. Particularly when you were hungover and bleeding."

"“The Troll is really smart. And fast. I’ve watched him take down a few wandering bad guys. And the kids in his posse are every bit as formidable.” “Ever make a raccoon trap?” “No,” C-plus said. “I was told they carried rabies, and I couldn’t see why it would be desirable to catch one.”"

"The young woman had turned toward him and thrust her pink gloves up in the air in a gesture that, from a man, meant “Touchdown!” and, from a woman, “I will hug you now!”"

"None of Seamus’ crew gave her more than a glance and a nod. They were intensely focused on their laptops: some sort of pitched battle. “Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!” “Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back.” …Fierce clicking and typing, punctuated by roaring, anguished laughter, as (Olivia guessed) each man’s character died in the game world. Planted around the dining area were plastic dolls: troll- or elf-like fantasy characters…Marked on the underside of each was the logo of Corporation 9592. So that answered the question she’d been afraid to ask, for fear of seeming like the stupidest person in the whole world: Are you playing T’Rain?"

"Black/Arab with an unmistakable dash of Italian. No one would mistake her for a model, but she’d found a look. Richard could only conjecture what style pheromones Zula was throwing off to her peers, but to him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy."

"“Welcome to the GWOJ.” “GWOJ?” “Global War on Jones.”"

"“You’re reading [Sokolov] all wrong,” Olivia said. They all just gazed at her, hoping she’d say more. “He’s a gentleman,” she explained, for want of any better way to put it. “Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?” said Uncle Meng."

"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."

"“Costello has been after Jones for a long time,” Olivia guessed. “He takes pride in his work, or used to. Jones got the better of him more than once…” “He is just your type,” Uncle Meng said gently. “Please do try not to fuck him.” “How come it’s okay for James Bond?”"

"Though Richard’s Wikipedia entry had been quiet lately, in the past it had been turbulent with edit wars between mysterious people, known only by their IP addresses, who seemed to want to emphasize aspects of his life that now struck him as, while technically true, completely beside the point. Fortunately this had all happened after Dad had become too infirm to manipulate a mouse, but it didn’t stop younger Forthrasts."

"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."

"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."

"The girl in the passenger seat said she had never before been in “a car like this,” meaning, apparently, a sedan. Richard felt far beyond merely old."

"Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold."

"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."

"Schloss Hundschüttler was a cat-skiing resort. They had no lifts. Guests were shuttled to the tops of the runs in diesel-powered tractors. The diesel-scented, almost Soviet nature of the experience filtered out the truly hyper-rich glamour seekers drawn to the helicopter option, who tended to be a mixture of seriously fantastic skiers and the more-money-than-brains types whose frozen corpses littered the approaches to Mt. Everest."

"Zula could only talk about what had been made public about T’Rain security, which was that her boss, Pluto, was the Keeper of the Key, the sole person on earth who knew a certain encryption key that was changed every month and that was used to digitally sign all the fantasy-geological output of his world-generating algorithm. It was sort of like the signature of the Treasurer of the United States that was printed on every dollar bill to certify that it was genuine."

"“Maybe they’ll just take us into Russia and—” “What?” Zula asked. “Kill us? They could have done that in Seattle.” “I don’t know,” Peter said, “sell us into white slavery or something.” “I’m not white.” “You know what I mean.”"

"“This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’”"

"Spies were supposed to have a strong intuitive sense of when they had been noticed, when someone else’s eyes were on them. Or at least that was the line of bullshit that the spycraft trainers liked to lay on their students. If true, then no Western spy could tolerate even a few seconds’ exposure to a Chinese street… If they had dressed up in clown suits, strapped strobe lights to their foreheads, and sprinted out into traffic firing tommy guns into the air, they would not have drawn more immediate and intense scrutiny by entering this public space as non-Chinese persons… They were not merely noticed. They were famous."

"Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov’s habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man."

"“There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. The vast popularity attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”"

"Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common. Pants pissing suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion."

"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."

"Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children."

"But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches."

"One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology."

"“...why, you just tell him that it was done by the Red-Neck Ronin, and that we went that-away!” And he thrusts his wakizashi into the untamed West…. “Let’s head for the hills, boys.”"

"“That’s why I was careful to say whenever some great prince sees fit to build it. If not the Tsar, then someone else who will come along after my death.” ”Or after mine, or my son’s or my grandson’s,” Johann says. “Human nature being what it is, I fear that this will only happen when the things that the Logic Mill is good at become important to a war.”"

"Most men, standing knee-deep in gold, would talk about that."

"“I spied ‘em again this morning, Tomba! …I looked to the West and saw ‘em, all lit up by the red sun shining in off the sea. A line of hills, or mountains if you please. Laid out, waiting for us, like baked apples in a pan.”"

"But I'd have you know that my Stupidity and my Skepticism are two sides of the same coin, and are of a very particular kind, which is carefully thought out. ... The imbalance between the grand mysteries of the Universe as opposed to our own feeble faculties, leads us to set very modest expectations as to what we shall and shan't be able to understand--and makes us passing suspicious of anyone who propounds dogma or seems to phant'sy he has got it all figured out. "Pray explain how it is that there may be such a thing as free will, and a spirit that may do as it pleases, unbound by the Mathematick laws of our Mechanical Philosophy."

"Though you, and most other Fellows of the Royal Society, are true Christians, and believers in Free Will, the very doctrines and methods that the Royal Society has promulgated have caused many to question the existence of God. ... As so much of civilization is rooted in those beliefs, this strikes me as one way in which our System of the World might be set up wrongly and thus self-doomed."