Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

“I’m afraid I don’t know enough about the stars even to say something wrong.”

the pre-owned-pornography store.”

Nooooooooooooooo

“Study theorics, which you’re so good at. Drink beer. Have Tivian liaisons with as many suurs as you can talk into it. Why is that so bad?”

“Fortunately, my blood supply is simply enormous, because of my size,” Arsibalt pointed out, “otherwise, I fear I should exsanguinate.”

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

Seeing beauty was going to keep me alive.

Not long after coming out, she’d married Jesry’s father, a somewhat older man who had put in three years and used what he’d learned to start a career doing whatever it was he did.

Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that ‘Diax’s Rake’ and sometimes we repeat it to ourselves as a reminder not to let subjective emotions cloud our judgment.”

The stuff was tremendous, like drinking your favorite book.

= wine of the library grape

Dinner became quite long, and not very ascetic.

“Pretend I’m someone who has never worried. I’m mystified. I don’t get it. Tell me how to worry.” “Well…I guess the first step is to envision a sequence of events as they might play out in the future.”

People have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs.

Barb was a copious source of awkward moments.

Not jumping-up-and-down anger but cold implacable fury that settled in my viscera and made me think some most unpleasant thoughts.

For one of the toxic things about Lineages was that rich avout could get not-so-rich ones to do things for them in exchange for better food, better drink, and better lodging.

And in the meantime, studying this thing answered that need in my gut to take some kind of action in response to what had been inflicted on Orolo. And I’d found that taking such action was the only way to transmute my anger back into grief.

Passage highlighting esp. for that last bit

“There might as well be,” Arsibalt said, “but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs.

"…as well be [an infinite amount of money]"

No aerocraft was waiting for us there. No buses. Not even a pair of roller skates.

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

“An intuition of the numenous,” Fraa Jad hazarded, “combined with a sense of dread.”

Fraa Jad defines "creepy"

This was no valley of the wet and verdant type, but a failure in the land where withered creeks went to die and flash floods spent their rage on a supine waste.

They both had the somewhat tense and frayed look of people who’d just spent several hours cooped up with Barb.

LOL

Whatever Fraa Jad was chanting was rooted, I knew, in thousands of years’ theorical research wedded to a musical tradition as old and as deep. But why put theorics into music at all? And why stay up all night sitting in a beautiful place chanting that music? There were easier ways to add two plus two.

Sammann had information in his jeejah that worked in lieu of money;

The next day started out refreshingly devoid of great events, new people, and astonishing revelations.

Anyway, he was used to being the only smart person within a hundred miles and now that he’d been thrown together with other smart people he didn’t know how to behave.

Here I was trying to pass for something I wasn’t, and it seemed best to assume I was doing a terrible job of it.

I was like an ape in a tree, looking at whatever moved fastest in my environment.

It occurred to me that we should not have chosen a corner table because this would make it impossible for us to get out quickly if there was some kind of trouble.

Clapping back to Hiro’s trouble, eh?

It has become obvious during the writing of this that it might one day be read by people from other worlds.

Our first REAL clue / foreshadowing of where this novel goes.

she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes.

This seems weird give that Erasmus is narrating — do the suurs in the Concent fuss about shoes??

Yul’s house was really just a dumping ground for stuff he couldn’t fit into his fetch:

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy.

The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure?

“And none of that would have been possible with some kind of technology that only an avout can understand,” Cord concluded.

RIGHT TO REPAIR

We, the theors, who had retreated (or, depending on how you liked your history, been herded) into the maths at the Reconstitution, had the power to change the physical world through praxis. Up to a point, ordinary people liked the changes we made. But the more clever the praxis became, the less people understood it and the more dependent they became on us—and they didn’t like that at all.

I tried to read some theorics books I’d brought, but couldn’t concentrate, and ended up sleeping for unreasonable amounts of time.

but it seemed they were willing to look the other way as long as illegals showed them the courtesy of being a little bit sneaky.

There’s not much point in trying to offer a description of the bleakness, the moral and physical misery.

We’d assumed that nothing could go on for so long unless it was safe—the way avout would run things if we were in charge.

Highlighting esp. for the first part

I felt hugely relieved at this, and in the next moment hated myself for being emotionally manipulated by a witch doctor.

This raised all sorts of interesting questions: was there really a difference between hurting, and seeming to hurt?

“There is no time in an emergence to think up plans.

flocks of livestock so tough and emaciated they looked like jerky on the hoof.

your consciousness is forever building counterfactual universes:

the stress and chaos relegated all such questions to a kind of intellectual quarantine.

After that I could not hear anything for half an hour. Hearing was worse than useless; I was sorry I’d been born with ears.

Some instinct told me to burrow. I went into the bathroom, turned off the light, turned on the shower, and ducked under the water. Once the temperature had stabilized I collapsed back against the wall, sank down until I was all folded up over the drain, and utterly lost control of myself. A lot went down that drain.

Erasmus was crying.

“Electron behavior is basically synonymous with chemistry,”