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Book: Reamde
Quotes of Book: Reamde

Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
The automatic waffle machine emitted a piercing electronic beep, signaling it wanted to be turned over. Seamus reached out and flipped it. The Four were standing at the complimentary breakfast bar of their hotel in Coeur d'Alene. None of the others had ever seen an automatic self-serve waffle machine before, and so Seamus was giving them an impromptu demo of the best that America had to offer. "I'm
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches-and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
Other people would want to sentimentalize about the old days, but the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship could be counterfeited when it was being minted anew from moment to moment. "I"
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
The stars' positions were randomly generated, a fact that drove Pluto crazy.
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking and thrilling."-Time
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way.
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
From long experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr's heaven.
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn't have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn't necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn't need to get involved.
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
Men wanted to be strong. 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. You simply couldn't go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who wanted to talk to you for hours about the ballistics of the .308 round or the relative merits of side-by-side versus over-and-under shotguns.
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields.
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Neal Stephenson _ Reamde
Mt. Rainier: the stupendous volcanic shotgun pointed at Seattle's head.
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