Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

The chapel itself was nothing worth mentioning, but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation.

War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.

Everywhere Randy goes in Southeast Asia he runs into women who ought to be running General Motors or something.

War gives men good ignoring skills.

This gives me an opening to mention what would normally be no one’s business but my own but which in these circumstances it is ethically mandated that I disclose, namely, that I am infatuated with daughter of DMS and that while not exactly reciprocating these feelings at full strength she finds me sufficiently non-loathsome to have dinner with me from time to time.

In the Navy, going to a whorehouse is about as controversial as pissing down the scuppers when you are on the high seas—the worst you can say about it is that, in other circumstances, it might seem uncouth.

But finally he identifies Mary Smith’s neck, which looks just as unspeakably erotic seen from behind through thirty yards of dense cigarette smoke as it did seen from the side in Mrs. McTeague’s parlor.

All of this comes into Waterhouse’s mind as he lies in his damp bed between four and six o’clock in the morning, considering his place in the world with the crystalline clarity that can only be obtained by getting a good night’s sleep and then venting several weeks’ jism production.

He’s going to church, and not exactly because he has renounced Satan and all his works, but because he wants to fuck Mary.

Being in the military is amazing; you give orders, and things happen.

“I think you are blowing the perceived sexual aspect of this thing way out of proportion,” Amy says. “Which is perfectly normal, for a guy, and I don’t think less of you for it.”

Randy is fully aware of the insanity of divulging secret business information to a woman solely for purposes of sexual self-titillation but it is in the nature of things, right now, that he doesn’t especially care.

“Not if you have good crypto,” Randy says. “Which we do.” “How did you get it?” “By hanging out with maniacs.” “What kind of maniacs?” “Maniacs who think that having good crypto is of near-apocalyptic importance.”

Sometimes a roughly car-sized dust devil would glide across the four-square courts and between the swingsets and score a direct hit on the jungle gym, which was an old-fashioned, unpadded, child-paralyzing unit hammered together by some kind of Dark Ages ironmonger and planted in solid concrete, a real school-of-hard-knocks, survival-of-the-fittest one.

“I don’t even know when they got married,” Randy says. “Isn’t that horrible?” “September of 1945,” Amy says. “I dragged it out of her.’ “Wow.” “Girl talk.” “I didn’t know you were even rigged for girl talk.” “We can all do it.”

“But I don’t think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It’s because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives.”

I’m ready to commit to her at any time. But for god’s sake, I’m not even sure she’s heterosexual. It’d be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.”

“My feeling about Amy is that she steers by her gut feelings, and her gut feeling is that you just don’t have the level of passion that a woman like her probably would like to see as a prequisite for getting involved.” “Whereas, if I stopped masturbating, I would become such a deranged maniac that she could trust me.”

He had a beard, and a staff of nurses and other female acolytes who were all permanently aflutter over his brilliantness and followed him around steering him away from large obstacles and reminding him to eat lunch.

But Doug says that overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it.

Randy’s got to get himself back into a Philippine frame of mind: the way to sneak into the country is not to mount some cloak-and-dagger operation, crawling up onto an isolated beach in a matte black wetsuit in the middle of the night, but simply to waltz in and make friends with all of the people who see you. Because it’s not like they’re stupid; they are going to see you.

For something disgusting and lethal, cigarettes are amazingly enjoyable.

He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they’re scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action.

“You know how people are always saying ‘I can keep a secret’ and they are always wrong?” “Yes.” “Well,” Waterhouse says, “I can keep a secret.”

Randy has this insight now that Doug pointed him in the direction of earlier, namely that the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka.

I’ve heard a hundred guys—mostly enlisted men—rhapsodize about mowing the lawn. That’s all those guys can talk about, is mowing the lawn. But when they get back home, will they want to mow the lawn?” “No.” “Right. They only talk like that because mowing the lawn sounds great when you’re sitting in a foxhole picking lice off your nuts.”

One of the useful things about military service is that it gets you acclimatized to having loud, blustery men say rude things to you.