Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises.

The air is so hot that when it comes out of your lungs it has actually cooled down by several degrees.

From a distance, Corregidor is a lens of jungle bulging out of the water with a flat shelf extending off to one side. From the maps, he knows that it is really a sperm-shaped affair. What looks like a shelf from this angle is its tail, which snakes off to the east as if the sperm were trying to swim out of Manila Bay to impregnate Asia.

The woman’s outfit is entirely grey, in keeping with Qwghlmian tradition, which scorns pigmentation as a loathsome and whorish innovation of the Scots.

“Avi,” says Eb solemnly, “any three points form a triangle.”

Not if they're in a straight line.

a cabin, or maybe (at about four by six feet) a corner of a cabin. There’s a bed, a little fold-out table, and cabinets made of actual wood. These in combination with the photographs of family and friends give it a cozy, domestic flavor which is, however, completely ruined by the framed picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall. Waterhouse finds this to be in shockingly poor taste until he remembers it’s a German boat.

It seems that when you are a certain age, somewhere between about two and five years, your mind just gels. The part of it that’s responsible for sex becomes set into a pattern that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life.

The part of your brain that handles sex frequently gets cross-wired into other, seemingly irrelevant areas at this age. This is when people pick up an orientation towards sexual dominance or submission, or when a lot of guys pick up highly specific kinks—say, rubber, feathers, or shoes. Some of them are unfortunate enough to get turned on by little kids, and those guys are essentially doomed from that point onwards—there is nothing to do except castrate them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.

Meanwhile, our basic Kapitanleutnant has got to be asking himself: what the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean? You could probably work it out, given the right data: Nn = number of Negroes per square kilometer Nm = number of milchcows AA = Area of the Atlantic Ocean … and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too complicated for a Kapitanleutnant to mess around with, especially when he’s busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in Nn.

She is lazily regarding a map of Scandinavia. Sweden dangles like a flaccid, circumcised phallus. Finland bulges scrotally underneath.

Finns are generally strangers to the entire concept of good fortune, however they are lucky enough to live right across the Gulf of Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.

Damn right. Never try to tell a Swede that he/she can't have their fika.

beaten like a red-headed stepchild

“I need an adventure like Hitler needs an ugly little toothbrush mustache,”

Göring reads through it quickly. Then he looks up at Rudy and Angelo and makes tut-tut-tut noises, shaking his gigantic head from side to side. Various layers of jowls, folds, and wattles follow, always a few degrees out of phase.

My testicles were squeezed at some length by a sergeant with a pencil mustache, whose motives did not appear to be sexual, but who simultaneously looked me searchingly in the eye, awaiting a look of submission or hopelessness on the face of the squeezed.

Hang on. Is he squeezing the testicles *using* the pencil moustache?

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.

Two large black Mercedes issue from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green lieutenant.

Otto produces a diamond ring literally out of his asshole—he carries valuables around in a polished metal tube shoved up his rectum—and Shaftoe serves as best man, uneasily holding that ring, still hot from Otto.

Jesus seems to writhe. An open scroll is fixed to the top of the crucifix; it says I.N.R.I. Goto Dengo spends a long time trying to fathom this. I Need Rapid something? Initiate Nail Removal Immediately?

“I do not expect you fellows to understand what the fuck Waterhouse is talking about. I’m gonna be running after him as fast as I can. You just hug his legs and hold on for dear life so that I can sort of keep his backside in view as long as possible.”

An odd thing to focus on.

The sky is streaked and mottled by black clouds, like jets of squid ink in a Caribbean cove.

“You know what this is? It’s one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things.” “I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying.” “It’s one of those American books where once you’ve heard the title you don’t even need to read it,” Randy says.

really he is hoping to find some nice pirate cove on the north coast of Borneo, marry a nice orangutan, and raise a little family.