Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

“De gustibus non est disputandum.”

The moral was preordained: the family took care of itself, even, no, especially in times of crisis, and consisted of good, wise, competent people.

“You’re just clever enough to be stupider than if you weren’t clever at all,”

Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.

Because of circumstances, today she is the most high-maintenance girlfriend since Cleopatra.”

Each death meant that a particular set of ideas and perceptions and reactions was gone from the world, apparently forever, and served as a reminder to Richard that one day his ideas and perceptions and reactions would be gone too.

For it was clear that, while one need not be rich, or even affluent, to survive in this environment, it was necessary to have some of the qualities that led to affluence when they were applied in more settled places.

laughed, and Richard grinned at him. “That was when understanding came to me,” Chet went on, “about the parallels and the meridians. The fact that we live in curved space. Parallels run straight. Meridians bend toward each other and at their beginnings and their ends they are all one. When the Nautilus—the first nuclear sub—reached the North Pole, it transmitted a message. You know what the message was?” “No,” Richard lied, even though he had heard Chet tell this story a hundred times to dumbfounded members of the Septentrion Paladins. “‘Latitude ninety degrees north,’” Chet said. “See, they couldn’t specify their longitude, because there, all the meridians are one. They were on all the meridians, and so they were on none of them. It’s a singularity.”