Jason Chilton

“Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

“In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life. Your life up to this point has given you all the experience you need to be intelligent, but you have to think about those experiences. If you don't think about them, you'll be psychologically unwell. If you do think about them, you will become not merely educated but intelligent.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“...he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it -- say, in a nice stained-glass window -- not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

“while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age