Neal Stephenson: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Most of the people on the Cloud Ark were going to have to be women.
There were other reasons for it besides just making more babies. Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time.
This was controversial, as it got into fraught topics of nature vs. nurture and whether gender identity was a social construct or a genetic program.
But if you bought into the idea that boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something that every parent who had ever raised a boy had to take seriously—then it was difficult to envision a lot of them spending their lives in tin cans.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Scouts"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Women , Men , People , Food

“As far as culture and politics are concerned, the important theme is long-attention-span vs. short-attention-span thinking. I'm sure that your readers can think of any number of ways in which having a longer attention span can be useful. But I'll name one. Bankers with long attention spans don't lend money to people who can't pay it back. If we had more bankers who adopted a long-term view of their responsibilities, we might not be in the middle of a financial crisis that is blowing away 150-year-old investment banks.”

Neal Stephenson

In response to whether Anathem "reflects today's culture or politics," from an interview published Sept. 22, 2008 by MIT News http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/stephenson-qa-0922.html

Money , People , Way , Thinking

“"Ylma is having you work it out in the most gruesome way possible… so that when she teaches you how it's really done, it'll seem that much easier…. Like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer—it feels so good when you stop." This was the oldest joke in the world, but Barb hadn't heard it before, and he became so amused that he got physically excited and had to run back and forth across the kitchen several times to flame off energy. A few weeks ago, I would have been alarmed by this and would have tried to calm him down, but now I was used to it, and knew that if I approached him physically things would get much worse.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 4, "Anathem"
Anathem (2008)

World , Way , Feeling , Time

“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.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 1
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

People

“There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind…knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next—that restricts our world’s path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible…”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Orolo and Erasmas, Part 4, "Anathem"
Anathem (2008)

World , Way , Freedom

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

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Jad to Raz, Part 11, "Advent"
Anathem (2008)

“Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 8, "Orithena"
Anathem (2008)

Way , Star , Light , Past

“Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.”

Neal Stephenson

"The Oral Tradition"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

History

“Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking…. Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. … there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals.
You just plug the pipes.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 6

Way , Night

“Passing through the utility section [Ivy] considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Hard Rain"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Coffee , Thinking

“The “Meat” were there because of REAMDE, which had been present at background levels for several weeks now but that recently had pinballed through the elbow in its exponential growth curve and for about twelve hours had looked as though it might completely take over all computing power in the Universe, until its own size and rapid growth had caused it to run afoul of the sorts of real-world friction that always befell seemingly exponential phenomena and bent those hockey-stick graphs over into lazy S plots.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 1
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

World , Universe , Hockey

“The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 4, Sangamon Taylor on why violent action is not necessary against polluting corporations

Light

“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 book Reamde

Sokolov, Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

Life , Feeling

““We live in strange times. I’m fertile right now. I can tell. No more condoms for you, tiger."… [Doob] was already thinking about the videos he was going to make to teach his baby about calculus when he climaxed.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"Scouts"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Thinking , Time , Baby

““Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with Artisan Flec.
“Do your shamans walk around on stilts?” Fraa Orolo asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness, was at least five centuries old. Then he looked up and added helpfully, “You might call them pastors or witch doctors.”
“When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifice to a painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?”
“Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and cats in some sort of afterlife?””

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 1, Provener; The questionnaire, in use for 1,100 years, is used once every ten years to determine if civilization outside the monastic compound is beginning to regress.
Anathem (2008)

Dogs , Cats , Reading , Painting

“It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels?
It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them. It also raises the question of why Microsoft is so bad at PR, when the history of Apple demonstrates that, by writing large checks to good ad agencies, you can plant a corporate image in the minds of intelligent people that is completely at odds with reality.”

Neal Stephenson

"Class Struggle on the Desktop"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

People , Guy , History , Intelligence

“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.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 1
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

War , Reading

“These changes in identity and location can easily become nested inside each other, many layers deep, even if you aren't doing anything nefarious. Once you have forgotten who and where you are, the whoami command is indispensible.”

Neal Stephenson

"The Oral Tradition"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

Change

“The moon had broken up into seven large pieces, which inevitably became known as the Seven Sisters, and an uncountable number of smaller ones. Gradually the big ones acquired names. Doc Dubois was responsible for many of these. He gave them descriptive names that wouldn’t scare people. It wouldn’t do to call them Nemesis or Thor or Grond. So instead it was Potatohead, Mr. Spinny, Acorn, Peach Pit, Scoop, Big Boy, and Kidney Bean.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"The Seven Sisters"; Book reviewers commonly compared the character DuBois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D. (aka Doc Dubois or Doob) to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Seveneves (2015), Part One

People , Boy , Sister

“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.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 9

Understanding , Nature