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Neal Stephenson citations
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Neal Town Stephenson, né le 31 octobre 1959 à Fort Meade dans le Maryland, est un auteur de science-fiction américain, plusieurs fois lauréat du prix Locus.

Son œuvre associe sciences, technologies de l'information et histoire, encadrées par des récits relevant de la science-fiction ou de l'uchronie. Son travail est à ce titre souvent comparé à celui de Thomas Pynchon. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. octobre 1959
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Neal Stephenson: 167   citations 0   J'aime

Neal Stephenson: Citations en anglais

“Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?”

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Neal Stephenson livre Snow Crash

Source: Snow Crash

“They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Part 2, Apert
Source: Anathem (2008)

“This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Quicksilver

Source: Quicksilver

“Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Part 11, "Advent." Fraa Jad, on his polycosmic approach to problem-solving.
Anathem (2008)

“There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth…”

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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

The legendary S.T. finally meets the legendary Hank Boone (proto-Enoch Root character), end of chapter 24
Zodiac (1988)

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

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 15
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“bulshytt … Technical and clinical term denoting speech (typically but not necessarily commercial or political) that employs euphemism, convenient vagueness, numbing repetition, and other such rhetorical subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said. …
It is inherent in the mentality of extramuros bulshytt-talkers that they are more prone than anyone else to taking offense (or pretending to) when their bulshytt is pointed out to them. … One is forced either to use this “offensive” word and be deemed a disagreeable person and as such excluded from polite discourse, or to say the same thing in a different way, which means becoming a purveyor of bulshytt oneself…. The latter quality probably explains the uncanny stability and resiliency of bulshytt.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Definition of "bulshytt," The Dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
Anathem (2008)

“For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.”

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Neal Stephenson

Wired 2.02: In the Kindom of Mao Bell http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell.html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set=

“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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They’d chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.
It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure I have, yet.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 11

“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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“Luisa knew how to use her own ignorance as an icebreaker in conversations. Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

"Pioneers and Prospectors"
Seveneves (2015), Part 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!””

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few years ahead of the rest.”

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Neal Stephenson livre The Big U

"The Go Big Red Fan" (prologue)
The Big U (1984)

“What people do isn't determined by where they live. It happens to be their damned fault. They decided to watch TV instead of thinking when they were in high school. They decided to blow-off courses and drink beer instead of reading and trying to learn something. They decided to chicken out and be intolerant bastards instead of being openminded and, finally, they decided to go along with their buddies and do things that were terribly wrong when there was no reason they had to. Anyone who hurts someone else decides to hurt them, goes out of their way to do it…. The fact that it's hard to be a good person doesn't excuse going along and being an asshole. If they can't overcome their own fear of being unusual, it's not my fault, because any idiot ought to be able to see that if he just acts reasonably and makes a point of not hurting others, he'll be happier.”

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Neal Stephenson livre The Big U

Sarah
The Big U (1984)

“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”).”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 20
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“The expression can be traced to the Third Centennial Apert, when the gates of several Hundreder maths opened to reveal startling outcomes, e. g.: at Saunt Rambalf's, a mass suicide that had taken place only moments earlier. At Saunt Terramore's, nothing at all — not even human remains. At Saunt Byadin's, a previously unheard-of religious sect…. At Saunt Lesper's, no humans, but a previously undiscovered species of tree-dwelling higher primates.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

From the definition of "to go Hundred," The Dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000 (Anathem's glossary)
Anathem (2008)

“In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.”

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Neal Stephenson

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

“He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 22

“Luisa chuckled. "I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics'—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.””

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

“Day 700"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

“"Describe worrying," he went on.
"What!?"
"Pretend I'm someone who has never worried. I'm mystified. It don't get it. Tell me how to worry."
"Well… I guess the first step is to envision a sequence of events as they might play out in the future."
"But I do that all the time. And yet I don't worry."
"It is a sequence of events with a bad end."
"So, you're worried that a pink dragon will fly over the concent and fart nerve gas on us?"”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

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

“When Doob came to his senses, he was aware that a large number of telephones were singing their little electronic songs.
Including his.
The birth cry of a new age.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

"The Age of the One Moon"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

“I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text.”

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Neal Stephenson

"OS Shock"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

“In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software. The density with which they’d been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence. Their devices could hold more data than anything you could buy today. Their ability to communicate through all sorts of wireless schemes was only now being matched.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“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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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 1

“But 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. There was something, somewhere, that he could do better than most people.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest, dustiest corners. … If they're really good, they don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find anything…. Old hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 8

“In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample.
And sometimes the gloves melt.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 4

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