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

— Neal Stephenson

Think that if Hero was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.

— Neal Stephenson

This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. Furthermore, we might just have an adventure or lean something. But we have been changed. We are standing close the Heraclitus fire, feeling its heat on our faces.

— Neal Stephenson

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

— Neal Stephenson

This "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaft and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaft had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gunshot posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details--and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaft has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

— Neal Stephenson

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.

— Neal Stephenson

Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.

— Neal Stephenson

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again—making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. […] Thus, Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics.

— Neal Stephenson

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

— Neal Stephenson

We are all in trouble.... with a bunch of dead people.

— Neal Stephenson