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.

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.

I’d rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping.

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it… a speelycaptor… at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all...

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.””I hadn’t known that,” I said. “I always tend to assume there’s an...

I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could...

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

But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.

This “sir, yes sir” business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot...

Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is … Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since...

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

And the English have grown so used to this that they use ‘currency’ as a synonym for money, as if no distinction need be observed between them.

Most of Csongor’s time in T’Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from...

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

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...

You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?””The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?

Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in-tune with nature.

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 at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that...

Indeed.

If you’ve put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe – to see you, and to give a fuck – you’ve already blown it.

Nell did not imagine that Constable Moore wanted to get into a detailed discussion of recent events, so she changed the subject. “I think I have finally worked out what you were trying to tell...

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,...

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line...

The curt maneuver forced hearty laughter from all of the fathers in the ballroom, who were delighted by the illusion of danger and the impotence of Nature.

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

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...

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...

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. We might just have an adventure or lean something. But...

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

[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good...

And so from then onwards, Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not merely to plot the curve but to understand why each curve was shaped as it was. To put...