Trash Panzer > Trash Panzer's Quotes

“Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“A realist writer might break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than the screams of the dying.”
― Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia

“Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the incomprehensible.”
― H.G. Wells

“It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Most of the brain's work is done while the brain's owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“Maybe we should go back and get their guns,” Marlon suggested. “That’s how it would work in a video game,” Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing.”
― Neal Stephenson, Reamde

“People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.”
― Neal Stephenson, Reamde

“Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“...what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves...Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“When in doubt, be patient, and watch.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“We are our own gods and our own demons”
― Sergei Lukyanenko, Twilight Watch

“An assassin can be found for every president. And for every prophet there are a thousand interpreters to distort the essence of the religion, to replace the bright flame with the heat of the inquisitors' pyres. The time came when every book was cast into the fire, when every symphony was reduced to a popular tune and played in all the drinking dens. A sound philosophical basis could be set in place under any vile nonsense.”
― Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch

“No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“What kind of half-assed apocalypse are they running down there?” Amos said. “Give ’em a break. It’s their first.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispered.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“And Olvos said to them: “Why have you done this, my children? Why is the sky wreathed with smoke? Why have you made war in far places, and shed blood in strange lands?

And they said to Her: “You blessed us as Your people, and we rejoiced, and were happy. But we found those who were not Your people, and they would not become Your people, and they were willful and ignorant of You. They would not open their ears to Your songs, or lay Your words upon their tongues. So we dashed them upon the rocks and threw down their houses and shed their blood and scattered them to the winds, and we were right to do so. For we are Your people. We carry Your blessings. We are Yours, and so we are right. Is this not what You said?”

And Olvos was silent.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties... They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important - that they are important. You don't get punished for doing something unimportant, after all.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“In retrospect they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It's attractive because it's simple, it's direct, it's almost always available as an option. When you can't think of a good rebuttal for your opponent's argument, you can always punch them in the face.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“Through millions of klicks of vacuum to hit a bull's-eye smaller than a mosquito's asshole.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'll still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She'd look up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She'd tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity that had put her there.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“They’d made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they’d hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate

“Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate