Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson

Its main competition used to be a U.S. highway and is now called Cruiseways, Inc. Rte. Cal-12. Farther up the Valley, the two competing highways actually cross.

That is good, that means high turnover for him, fast action, keep moving that ’za.

And even the word “library” is getting hazy. It used to be a place full of books, mostly old ones. Then they began to include videotapes, records, and magazines. Then all of the information got converted into machine-readable form, which is to say, ones and zeroes.

horse testosterone

Big ornate sign above the main gate: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON-CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED.

Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And the clientele has a lot more class—no talking penises in here. The

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.” Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was.

"i mean not to toot my own horn or anything ."- the author

“It’s a dangerous world,” Lagos says. “Getting more dangerous all the time.

“All destined to wear blazers and shuffle papers in suburbia. You don’t respect those people very much, Y.T., because you’re young and arrogant. But I don’t respect them much either, because I’m old and wise.”

She drops them down into the secret place between her breasts. They are still warm from Uncle Enzo.

this is pretty weird.

Eusebius observed similar phenomena around the year 300, saying that the false prophet begins by a deliberate suppression of conscious thought, and ends in a delirium over which he has no control.”

“Ah, there’s that word ‘binary’ again.”

Lol

She has to hang up on the old bitch. It’s impossible to talk to her.

“It’s like, if you—people of a certain age—would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn’t have to take these drastic measures.”

Its so easy

He uses glass knives.

Bad. Ass.

Basically, it just certifies that Y.T. is not a terrorist, Communist (whatever that is), homosexual, national-symbol desecrator, pornography merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family values. Most of it is just definitions of all the words used on the first page. So

Everyone except for Y.T. She couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. It just seemed embarrassingly stupid to her. So she just faked it.

Ding

You’re in this place. There’s other people all around you, but they don’t understand you and you don’t understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.

Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

“If we get out of this, will you be my girl?”

C o r n b a l l