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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
Neal Stephenson photo
Neal Stephenson: 167   citations 0   J'aime

Neal Stephenson: Citations en anglais

“The work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be, it was how you got a productive economy.
But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power, but of story. If their employees came home with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing.
The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story…had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure?”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Erasmas theorizing why others are joining his journey, Part 7, "Feral"
Anathem (2008)

“The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.”

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Neal Stephenson

"Mother Earth Mother Board," cover story in Wired, 4.12 (1996)

“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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“He 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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land…all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T — but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 4

“In the whole world, there might have been as many as ten thousand people who were better than Sokolov at falling and rolling around on hard surfaces. Circus acrobats and aikido masters, mostly. Also included in that group would have been many of the younger Spetsnaz men. The remaining six billion or so living humans did not even enter the picture.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“She…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, a camouflage hat. Freeze-dried meals. A roll of black plastic sheeting. Parachute cord. Batteries. A folding bucksaw. 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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 8
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: It made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“Don Donald was clearly accustomed to addressing people whose only way of responding was to nod worshipfully and take notes. He did not, in other words, leave a lot of breaks in his testimony to allow for discussion. For the moment, that was fine, since it made it easier for Richard to drink.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“I can hardly believe we are talking about a possibility so inconceivable as that other universes exist—and that the Geometers originate there!"
In this, Zh'vaern seemed to speak for the entire table.
Except for Jad. "The words fail. There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes—that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives—until they came here, and joined ours."
Having dropped this bomb, Fraa Jad excused himself, and went to the toilet.
"What on earth is he going on about?" Fraa Lodoghir demanded. "It sounded like literary criticism!”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Part 10, "Messal"
Anathem (2008)

“Yul had simply launched himself at the guy from some distance away, and body-checked him at full speed, stopping on a dime in midair as he transferred all of his energy into the target.
"Conservation of momentum," he announced, "it's not just a good idea—it's the law!"”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Yulassetar Crade removes a TV reporter in zero gravity, Part 12, "Requiem"
Anathem (2008)

“Eve Moira had been a child of London, fascinated by the natural world, but drawn to the city. So, Kath Two looked to the bright lights of the big city.
Here, that meant gazing up into the sky.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

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

““I have done research on it,” Aïda said. “Some say that bipolarity is a useful adaptation. When things are bad, you become depressed, retreat, conserve energy. When things are good, you spring into action with great energy.”
“And your point is …”
“Will you treat this condition in my offspring against my will?”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

What if I want to have a lot of little bipolar kids?”
"Cleft"
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

“It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. … Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning’s sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books. In one sense Amelia and her colleagues had never been more needed, never had such an opportunity to show their quality.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

"The Casting of Lots"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

“There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “A's hire A's, and B's hire C's,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to sign up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 18 (This saying was popularized by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his "Rumsfeld's Rules" document, dating back to his tenure on the Ford Administration transition team.)
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

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

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Day 4
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success.”

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Neal Stephenson

"Mother Earth Mother Board," cover story in Wired, 4.12 (1996)

“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”

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Neal Stephenson

"Innovation Starvation," World Policy Journal, Fall 2011

“But in that we started so many things in that moment, we brought to their ends many others that have been the subject matter of this account, and so here is where I draw a line across the leaf and call it the end.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Anathem

Final sentence of the novel, possibly addressing criticism of the author’s previous endings, Part 13, "Reconstitution"
Anathem (2008)

“Very old money was behind the Crow’s Nest. And enough of it that its Owners didn’t mind losing some every month to keep the place going. It was a kind of eleemosynary institution, created to serve not culture and not dukh, but a thing called the Purpose.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

And if Ty kept working there for another few decades, perhaps one of the Owners would sit him down one day in the Bolt Hole and deign to tell him what exactly the Purpose was.
"Five Thousand Years Later"
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and 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. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“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.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

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

“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. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. 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…”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

Economics of gold farming, Thanksgiving (prologue)
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

“It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Zodiac

"I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that."
"Well, I wouldn't say it in public."
"Cohen," the assistant attorney general of an unnamed East Coast state meeting covertly with Sangamon Taylor near the Jersey Shore. Chapter 11
Zodiac (1988)

“Agreement got by compulsion or trickery is not agreement, but a thing akin to slavery. Free minds are the only company worth having.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Source: Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019), Chapter 43

“Welcome to the GWOJ.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Reamde

“GWOJ?”
“Global War on Jones.”
Day 15
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“If you are going to make first contact with an intelligent alien race,” said Cantabrigia Five, “dropping huge strip-mining robots into their homeland might not be your best move.”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 830)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“If you show her too much favor she will be punished. If you touch her, we’re all dead,” Ty said.
“Why?”

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Neal Stephenson livre Seveneves

Einstein asked.
“Because this is one of those cultures that is psychotic about female reproductive organs.”
“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 776)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

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