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Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson Quotes

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Famous Neal Stephenson Quotes

“Give me an adventure. I'm not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I'm old." "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

KnowsGivingKindLittlesSaidI CanEndsSeemsMightRememberTalkingAdventureMassGive MeMassiveRemember WhenNot TalkingBurialGetting Fired
Book:Anathem
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“Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

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Book:Anathem
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“[Regarding] the soul, I'm a little wary of any discourse on that topic that pretends to have an answer, so I tend to keep my musings to myself. There is interesting, legitimate metaphysical work on the topic going at least as far back as Leibniz and continuing today, following the theme that consciousness, or at least computation, might be at least as fundamental as phenomena such as space, time, energy, and matter, which are the usual subject matter of physics. I follow that sort of thing with interest but with very modest expectations that answers will be arrived at during my lifetime.”

LittlesSoulMatterMightTodayEnergyInterestSpaceAnswersInterestingConsciousnessSubjectsExpectationsFundamentalsLifetimeFollowingPhysicsThemeUsualContinuingModestDiscourseTopicsMetaphysicalSubject MatterMusingsSpace TimeComputation
Author:Neal Stephenson
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“An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.”

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Book:Anathem
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“The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.”

IfsWayMindLittlesTwoIdeasChangedInvisibleDestinationUnitsRoutesFickleLittle MindsGpsWatersheds
Book:Reamde
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