β
See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
You were the sun, and I was crashing into you.
β
β
Rainbow Rowell (Carry On (Simon Snow, #1))
β
You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. I'd wake up every morning and think, 'This will end in flames.
β
β
Rainbow Rowell (Carry On (Simon Snow, #1))
β
She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after.... She doesn't want you to understand her. She knows that's impossible. She just wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
This Snow Crash thing--is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?β
Juanita shrugs. βWhat's the difference?
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
I just saved your fucking life, Mom. . . . You could at least offer me an Oreo.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
I don't even want you to nod, that's how much you annoy me. Just freeze and shut up.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Well, all information looks like noise until you break the code.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Did you win your sword fight?"
"Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world."
"And you wrote the software."
"Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Besides, interesting things happen along bordersβtransitionsβnot in the middle where everything is the same.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The way you were beforeβ¦ Simon Snow, there wasnβt a day when I believed weβd both live through it.β
βThough what?β
βLife. You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. Iβd wake up every morning and think, βThis will end in flames.
β
β
Rainbow Rowell (Carry On (Simon Snow, #1))
β
Ideology is a virus.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The sight of the bare katana inspires everyone to a practically Nipponese level of politeness
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Are there bears in these mountains?" he asked.
His companion nodded. "Of course. But it's a bit early in the year for them to be moving around. Why?"
Halt let go a long breath. "Just a vague hope, really. There's a chance that when the Temujai here you crashing around in the trees, they might think you're a bear."
Erak smiled, with his mouth only. His eyes were as cold as the snow.
"You're a very amusing fellow," he told Halt. "I'd like to brain you with my ax one of these days."
"If you could manage to do it quietly, I'd almost welcome it," Halt said.
β
β
John Flanagan (The Battle for Skandia (Ranger's Apprentice, #4))
β
Itβs, like, one of them drug dealer boats,β Vic says, looking through his magic sight. βFive guys on it. Headed our way.β He fires another round. βCorrection. Four guys on it.β Boom. βCorrection, theyβre not headed our way anymore.β Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. βCorrection. No boat.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
I gave three quiet cheers for Minnesota. In Seattle a dusty inch of anything white and chilly means the city lapses into full-on panic mode, as if each falling flake crashes to earth with its own individual baggie of used hypodermic needles. Itβs ridiculous.
β
β
Cherie Priest (Bloodshot (Cheshire Red Reports, #1))
β
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.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
I didn't tell him, I never told him. Not in a way that he believed. Not in a way that he could let in and hold on to. Everything he was to me. That he was everything.
Simon, Simon . . .
You were the sun, and I was crashing into you.
I'd wake up every morning and tell myself . . .
I'd tell myself . . .
"You live in fear! In denial!"
Simon is on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way. His blood is red and abundant. It smells like brown butter. His hair is a mess, his face is in the sand. He doesn't know how much I love him. He's never really heard it.
I'd wake up every morning and tell myself . . .
"Simon . . . love . . . get up. We still have to save Agatha."
Simon is on the ground.
This will end in flames.
β
β
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
β
CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
...class is more than income - it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
If you did enough traveling, you'd never feel at home anywhere.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder β its DNA β Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothingβthis pivotal separation between being and nonbeingβis quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket
β
β
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
β
I just saved your fucking life, Mom...It's like, if you--people of a certain age--would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
When it gets down to it β talking trade balances here β once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here β once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel β once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity β y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
BMW drivers take evasive action at the drop of a hat, emulating the drivers in the BMW advertisements β this is how they convince themselves they didnβt get ripped off.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
They made data a controlled substance.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
--after that it's just a chase scene.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
That's when the realization comes. It swims up out of her subconscious in the same way that a nightmare does. Or when you leave the house and remember half an hour later that you left a teakettle going on the stove. It's a cold clammy reality that she can't do a damn thing about.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
β¦he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as itβs happening to him. Very post-modern.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety-floating around on an ocean of generalized terror.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Even the word βscience' comes from an Indo-European root meaning βto cut' or βto separate.' The same root led to the word βshit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us βscythe' and βscissors' and βschism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
...in the background she can hear the shopping carts performing their clashy, anal copulations.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Sorry, baby. Let's get out of here,β he says, speaking with the intense, strained tones of a man with an erection.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Vitaly owns half a carton of Lucky Strikes, an electric guitar, and a hangover
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. The old lady on the bus with her Orwell, the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell, the teenager roaring through Capote -- they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire. Their hearts are flooding. With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss -- you are the mathematical calculation that plots the trajectory of the blazing, crashing zeppelin. You -- pale, punchable reader -- are terraforming whole worlds in your head, which will remain with you until the day you die. These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia, or Jamaica Inn, or Gormenghast will still be there; as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them -- hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until you transfused them with your time, and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as "just being a bit of a bookworm.
β
β
Caitlin Moran
β
Shut up. For the rest of this conversation, you don't say anything. When I tell you what you did wrong, you don't say you're sorry, because I already know you're sorry. And when you drive outta here alive, you don't thank me for being alive. And you don't even say goodbye to me.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The giant scratched his beard, and a single white whisker twirled down like an Apache helicopter and crashed nearby, sending up a mushroom cloud of snow.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Hammer of Thor (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, #2))
β
Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated - the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind."
"Like instructions for programming a VCR.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The way you were before β¦ Simon Snow, there wasnβt a day when I believed weβd both live through it.β βThrough what?β βLife. You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. Iβd wake up every morning and think, βThis will end in flames.
β
β
Rainbow Rowell (Carry On (Simon Snow, #1))
β
Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV-which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite-the people who go into the Meatverse, basically-who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Spring arrives. It always finds us, in the end. The wind sweeps winter away, the trees rustle and birds start making a fuss, and nature suddenly crashes through with a deafening roar where the snow has swallowed every echo for months.
β
β
Fredrik Backman (Anxious People)
β
All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
If she screws up this delivery, that means she's double-crossing God, who may or may not exist, and in any case who is capable of forgiveness. The Mafia definitely exists and hews to a higher standard of obedience.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.
What a fucking rat race that is.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
They say that in D.C., all the museums and the monuments have been concessioned out and turned into a tourist park that now generates about 10 percent of the Government's revenue.
The Feds could run the concession themselves and probably keep more of the gross, but that's not the point. It's a philosophical thing. A back-to-basics thing. Government should govern. It's not in the entertainment industry, is it? Leave entertaining to Industry weirdos -- people who majored in tap dancing. Feds aren't like that. Feds are serious people. Poli-sci majors. Student council presidents. Debate club chairpersons. The kinds of people who have the grit to wear a dark wool suit and a tightly buttoned collar even when the temperature has greenhoused up to a hundred and ten degrees and the humidity is thick enough to stall a jumbo jet. The kinds of people who feel most at home on the dark side of a one-way mirror.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles; Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass of every Army base in the world.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
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, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth.
If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.
β
β
John McPhee (Annals of the Former World)
β
Blow on, ye death fraught whirlwinds! blow,
Around the rocks, and rifted caves;
Ye demons of the gulf below!
I hear you, in the troubled waves.
High on this cliff, which darkness shrouds
In night's impenetrable clouds,
My solitary watch I keep,
And listen, while the turbid deep
Groans to the raging tempests, as they roll
Their desolating force, to thunder at the pole.
Eternal world of waters, hail!
Within thy caves my Lover lies;
And day and night alike shall fail
Ere slumber lock my streaming eyes.
Along this wild untrodden coast,
Heap'd by the gelid' hand of frost;
Thro' this unbounded waste of seas,
Where never sigh'd the vernal breeze;
Mine was the choice, in this terrific form,
To brave the icy surge, to shiver in the storm.
Yes! I am chang'd - My heart, my soul,
Retain no more their former glow.
Hence, ere the black'ning tempests roll,
I watch the bark, in murmurs low,
(While darker low'rs the thick'ning' gloom)
To lure the sailor to his doom;
Soft from some pile of frozen snow
I pour the syren-song of woe;
Like the sad mariner's expiring cry,
As, faint and worn with toil, he lays him down to die.
Then, while the dark and angry deep
Hangs his huge billows high in air ;
And the wild wind with awful sweep,
Howls in each fitful swell - beware!
Firm on the rent and crashing mast,
I lend new fury to the blast;
I mark each hardy cheek grow pale,
And the proud sons of courage fail;
Till the torn vessel drinks the surging waves,
Yawns the disparted main, and opes its shelving graves.
When Vengeance bears along the wave
The spell, which heav'n and earth appals;
Alone, by night, in darksome cave,
On me the gifted wizard calls.
Above the ocean's boiling flood
Thro' vapour glares the moon in blood:
Low sounds along the waters die,
And shrieks of anguish fill the' sky;
Convulsive powers the solid rocks divide,
While, o'er the heaving surge, the embodied spirits glide.
Thrice welcome to my weary sight,
Avenging ministers of Wrath!
Ye heard, amid the realms of night,
The spell that wakes the sleep of death.
Where Hecla's flames the snows dissolve,
Or storms, the polar skies involve;
Where, o'er the tempest-beaten wreck,
The raging winds and billows break;
On the sad earth, and in the stormy sea,
All, all shall shudd'ring own your potent agency.
To aid your toils, to scatter death,
Swift, as the sheeted lightning's force,
When the keen north-wind's freezing breath
Spreads desolation in its course,
My soul within this icy sea,
Fulfils her fearful destiny.
Thro' Time's long ages I shall wait
To lead the victims to their fate;
With callous heart, to hidden rocks decoy,
And lure, in seraph-strains, unpitying, to destroy.
β
β
Anne Bannerman (Poems by Anne Bannerman.)
β
And then she figures out something important: These people aren't looking at her. They're not even giving her a second glance. They're all looking at Raven. And it's not just a case of celebrity watching or something like that. All of these Raft dudes, these tough scary homeboys of the sea, are scared shitless of this guy. And she's on a date with him. And it's just started.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
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, devoted it to wiping
out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is
liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest
motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one
thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach,
of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man
could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop,
slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the
world title out of reach.
Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your
limitations. Make do with what you've got.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
β
Letter 7
In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants. Too heavy for their wings, they sometimes crashed through the trees and frightened other animals.
All the flying grey elephants migrated to the source of the Ganges. They agreed to renounce their wings and settle on the earth. When they molted millions of wings fell to the earth, the snow covered them, and the Himalayas were born.
The blue elephants landed in the sea and their wings became fins. They are the whales, the trunkless elephants of the oceans. Their cousins are the manatees, the trunkless elephants of the rivers.
The chameleon elephants kept their wings but agreed never to land on earth. They change colors of their feathers every day. Today they are azure, and when it rains they are the color of pearls.
When they go to sleep, the chameleon elephants always lie down in the same place in the sky and dream with one eye open. The stars you see at night are the unblinking eyes of sleeping elephants, who sleep with one eye open to best keep watch over us.
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Gregory Colbert (Ashes and Snow: A Novel in Letters)
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All's ringing, roaring, grinding, breakers' crash -
and silence all at once, release:
it means he is tiptoeing over pine needles,
so as not to startle the light sleep of space.
And it means he is counting the grains
in the blasted ears; it means
he has come again to the Daryal Gorge,
accursed and black, from another funeral.
And again Moscow, where the heart's fever burns.
Far off the deadly sleighbell chimes,
someone is lost two steps from home
in waist-high snow. The worst of times...
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Anna Akhmatova (The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova)
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A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speechβthe form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder β its DNA β xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a lef- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, youβd wander down to Momβs CafΓ© for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didnβt recognize. If you did enough traveling, youβd never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonaldβs and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonaldβs is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. βNo surprisesβ is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the worldβs most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish
this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance."
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto. Follow the loglo outward, to where the growth is enfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, space walks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock, motorcycle gangs, and bun-gee jumping. They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture. The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. Young smart people like Da5id and Hiro, who take the risk of living in the city because they like stimulation and they know they can handle it.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. The old lady on the bus with her Orwell, the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell, the teenager roaring through Capote -- they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire. Their hearts are flooding. With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss -- you are the mathematical calculation the plots the trajectory of the blazing, crashing zeppelin. You -- pale, punchable reader -- are terraforming whole worlds in your head, which will remain with you until the day you die. These books are as much a part of you as your guts and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia, or Jamaica Inn, or Gormenghast will still be there; as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them -- hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until you transformed them with your time, and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as "just being a bit of a bookworm.
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Caitlin Moran (Moranifesto)
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You are hereby warned that any movement on your part not explicitly endorsed by verbal authorization on my part may pose a direct physical risk to you, as well as consequential psychological and possibly, depending on your personal belief system, spiritual risks ensuing from your personal reaction to said physical risk. Any movement on your part constitutes an implicit and irrevocable acceptance of such risk," the first MetaCop says. There is a little speaker on his belt, simultaneously translating all of this into Spanish and Japanese.
"Or as we used to say," the other MetaCop says, "freeze, sucker!"
"Under provisions of The Mews at Windsor Heights Code, we are authorized to enforce law, national security concerns, and societal harmony on said territory also. A treaty between The Mews at Windsor Heights and White Columns authorizes us to place you in temporary custody until your status as an Investigatory Focus has been resolved."
"Your ass is busted," the second MetaCop says.
"As your demeanor has been nonaggressive and you carry no visible weapons, we are not authorized to employ heroic measures to ensure your cooperation," the first MetaCop says.
"You stay cool and we'll stay cool," the second MetaCop says.
"However, we are equipped with devices, including but not limited to projectile weapons, which, if used, may pose an extreme and immediate threat to your health and well-being."
"Make one funny move and we'll blow your head off," the second MetaCop says.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia ... It made him feel naked and weak and brave.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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Simon's lying on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way.
Lamb: "Yes, all right, I've betrayed you. Just keep your cool, Baz, and you'll live to hate me for it."
I'll live...
Simon.
We heard gunshots. On the other side of the hill. And then we didn't.
Simon's on the ground, his wing is bent the wrong way. Someone should fix it for him. Someone should cast a spell. I'd cast it, but I'm in a dead spot. I'm in a Quiet Zone. I'm keeping my wand a secret, I'm pretending to be a vampire.
"Simon..."
Simon Snow.
The way you were. There wasn't a day I believed we'd both live through it.
(Through what, through what, through what?)
Lamb: "The treaty holds!"
Simon:
Simon is on the ground. There were gunshots, and then there weren't. His wing is bent the wrong way. His hair is a mess. He doesn't have a sword.
I told him it would be alright.
I told him...
I didn't tell him, I never told him. Not in a way that he believed. Not in a way that he could let in and hold onto. Everything he was to me. That he was everything.
Simon, Simon...
You were the sun, and I was crashing into you.
I'd wake up every morning and tell myself...
I'd tell myself...
"You live in fear! In denial!"
Simon is on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way. His blood is red and abundant. It smells like brown butter. His hair is a mess, his face is in the sand. He doesn't know how much I love him. He's never really heard it.
I'd wake up every morning and tell myself...
"Simon, love, get up. We still have to save Agatha."
Simon is on the ground.
This will end in flames.
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Rainbow Rowell (Carry On (Simon Snow, #1))
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You want to leave the moat, to go back to the room; youβre already turning and trying to find the door, covered with fake leather, in the steep wall of the moat, but the master succeeds in grabbing your hand and, looking straight in your eyes, says: Your assignment: describe the jaw of a crocodile, the tongue of a hummingbird, the steeple of the New Maiden Convent, a shoot of bird cherry, the bend of the Lethe, the tail of any village dog, a night of love, mirages over hot asphalt, the bright midday in Berezov, the face of a flibbertigibbet, the garden of hell, compare the termite colony to the forest anthill, the sad fate of leaves to the serenade of a Venetian gondolier, and transform a cicada into a butterfly, turn rain into hail, day into night, give us today our daily bread, make a sibilant out of a vowel, prevent the crash of the train whose engineer is asleep, repeat the thirteenth labor of Hercules, give a smoke to a passerby, explain youth and old age, sing a song about a bluebird bringing water in the morn, turn your face to the north, to the Novgorodian barbicans, and then describe how the doorman knows it is snowing outside, if he sits in the foyer all day, talks to the elevator operator, and does not look out the window because there is no window; yes, tell how exactly, and in addition, plant in your orchard a white rose of the winds, show it to the teacher Pavel and, if he likes it, give the white rose to the teacher Pavel, pin the flower to his cowboy shirt or to his dacha hat, bring joy to the man who departed to nowhere, make your old pedagogueβa joker, a clown, and a wind-chaserβhappy.
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Sasha Sokolov (A School for Fools)
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This will not be a normal winter. The winter will begin, and it will continue, winter following winter. There will be no spring, no warmth. People will be hungry and they will be cold and they will be angry. Great battles will take place, all across the world. Brothers will fight brothers, fathers will kill sons. Mothers and daughters will be set against each other. Sisters will fall in battle with sisters, and will watch their children murder each other in their turn. This will be the age of cruel winds, the age of people who become as wolves, who prey upon each other, who are no better than wild beasts. Twilight will come to the world, and the places where the humans live will fall into ruins, flaming briefly, then crashing down and crumbling into ash and devastation. Then, when the few remaining people are living like animals, the sun in the sky will vanish, as if eaten by a wolf, and the moon will be taken from us too, and no one will be able to see the stars any longer. Darkness will fill the air, like ashes, like mist. This will be the time of the terrible winter that will not end, the Fimbulwinter. There will be snow driving in from all directions, fierce winds, and cold colder than you have ever imagined cold could be, an icy cold so cold your lungs will ache when you breathe, so cold that the tears in your eyes will freeze. There will be no spring to relieve it, no summer, no autumn. Only winter, followed by winter, followed by winter. After that there will come the time of the great earthquakes. The mountains will shake and crumble. Trees will fall, and any remaining places where people live will be destroyed. The earthquakes will be so great that all bonds and shackles and fetters will be destroyed. All of them. Fenrir, the great wolf, will free himself from his shackles. His mouth will gape: his upper jaw will reach the heavens, the lower jaw will touch the earth. There is nothing he cannot eat, nothing he will not destroy. Flames come from his eyes and his nostrils. Where Fenris Wolf walks, flaming destruction follows. There will be flooding too, as the seas rise and surge onto the land. Jormungundr, the Midgard serpent, huge and dangerous, will writhe in its fury, closer and closer to the land. The venom from its fangs will spill into the water, poisoning all the sea life. It will spatter its black poison into the air in a fine spray, killing all the seabirds that breathe it. There will be no more life in the oceans, where the Midgard serpent writhes. The rotted corpses of fish and of whales, of seals and sea monsters, will wash in the waves. All who see the brothers Fenrir the wolf and the Midgard serpent, the children of Loki, will know death. That is the beginning of the end.
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Neil Gaiman (Norse Mythology)
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So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
"He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are
both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had
essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
"But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists
think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the
pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits."
"Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a
language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret."
"The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro
says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only
once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the
information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into
hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out,
but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the
newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and
that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself
accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent
part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it."
"Yes. This was his interpretation."
"Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers,
what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language
and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing
the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?"
"Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language
and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave
him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the
functioning of the brain and of the body."
"Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs
in English?"
"Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are
better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend
themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine
had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of
the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may
have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and
transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an
extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand
years ago."
"A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking."
"Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language
called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to
understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the
language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word.
In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote
Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like
a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a
light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second
Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom
Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and
all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine
Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem,
meaning 'master of the divine name.'"
"The machine language of the world," Hiro says.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)