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I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.

Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 31
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Camp Annapolis Junction
Neal Town Stephenson
Stephen Bury
Connection
Connections
Hunger
Instinct
Survival
Actually
Think
Thinking
Immortality

More quotes by Neal Stephenson

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Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.
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... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.
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This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.
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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.
Neal Stephenson
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It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
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Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.
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The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening, Miss Pao said, regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique.
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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.
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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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Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
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I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.
Neal Stephenson
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This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
Neal Stephenson
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It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn't working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.
Neal Stephenson
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She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
Neal Stephenson
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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.
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I am on an expense account that would blow your mind.
Neal Stephenson
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As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.
Neal Stephenson