Fall; or, Dodge in Hell Quotes

“The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Identity” had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant “who you really are” but now it meant “any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Corvallis sometimes thought back on the day, three decades ago, when Richard Forthrast had reached down and plucked him out of his programming job at Corporation 9592 and given him a new position, reporting directly to Richard. Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard had answered, simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of performance art in the middle of the HR department’s open-plan workspace, he had explained that work of a routine, predictable nature could and should be embodied in computer programs. If that proved too difficult, it should be outsourced to humans far away. If it was somehow too sensitive or complicated for outsourcing, then “you people” (meaning the employees of the HR department) needed to slice it and dice it into tasks that could be summed up in job descriptions and advertised on the open employment market. Floating above all of that, however, in a realm that was out of the scope of “you people,” was “weird stuff.” It was important that the company have people to work on “weird stuff.” As a matter of fact it was more important than anything else. But trying to explain “weird stuff” to “you people” was like explaining blue to someone who had been blind since birth, and so there was no point in even trying. About then, he’d been interrupted by a spate of urgent text messages from one of the company’s novelists, who had run aground on some desolate narrative shore and needed moral support, and so the discussion had gone no further. Someone had intervened and written a sufficiently vague job description for Corvallis and made up a job title that would make it possible for him to get the level of compensation he was expecting. So it had all worked out fine. And it made for a fun story to tell on the increasingly rare occasions when people were reminiscing about Dodge back in the old days. But the story was inconclusive in the sense that Dodge had been interrupted before he could really get to the essence of what “weird stuff” actually was and why it was so important. As time went on, however, Corvallis understood that this very inconclusiveness was really a fitting and proper part of the story.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“What’s the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There’s no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool’s errand.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world’s adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“The tragedy—and the entire point—of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“He saw life as a trench in the First World War sense of that term, dug very deep at one end but becoming more shallow as you marched along, gradually ramping up to surface level. Early in your life you were so deep down in it that you didn’t even know that shells were bursting and bullets zipping over its top. As time went on these became noticeable but not directly relevant. At a certain point you began to see people around you getting injured or even killed by stray bits of shrapnel, but even if they were good friends of yours, you knew, in your grief and shock, that they were statistical aberrations. The more you kept marching, however, the more difficult it became to ignore the fact that you were drawing close to the surface. People in front of you died singly, then in clusters, then in swathes. Eventually, when you were something like a hundred years old, you emerged from the trench onto open ground, where your life span was measured in minutes.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“If they’d had access to modern diagnostic manuals they’d have been able to say, ‘Ah, it says right here here that I am a paranoid schizophrenic,’ but lacking such documentation, they had to self-observe. When certain processes in the mind run out of control, or, at the other end of the spectrum, cease to function at the level needed to preserve a kind of psychiatric homeostasis, the effects are observable to an introspective patient. If you’re a stylite monk, you’re pretty much screwed and you just have to think your way around it.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Did the ants feeding on a puddle of spilled soda experience its sweetness? Or were they too simple for that and only responding programmatically? The infrared sensor on an elevator door did not experience qualia of people stepping through its beam; it was just a dumb switch. Where on the evolutionary ladder did the brain stop being a glorified elevator door sensor and begin to experience qualia? Before or after ants? Or was it the case that an individual ant was too simple to experience qualia but a whole swarm of them collectively did?”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“wallet card for people to keep in front of them during conversations like this one. One side of the card was solid red, with no words or images, and was meant to be displayed outward as a nonverbal signal that you disagreed and that you weren’t going to be drawn into a fake argument. The other side, facing the user, was a list of little reminders as to what was really going on: Speech is aggression Every utterance has a winner and a loser Curiosity is feigned Lying is performative Stupidity is power”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed,” Enoch said, “and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/seven in their own personalized hallucination stream. And if you are still tied to reality by family or by some kind of regularizing influence in your day-to-day life, like having a job, then you’ve got a fighting chance. But those people—” Since it was awkward to gesture using ice-packed mitts, he pointed out the side window with his chin. “My goodness. Religion as such—as it has existed and flourished for thousands of years—doesn’t stand a chance.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“So, this place Zelrijk-Aalberg straddles the border of Belgium”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“But one of the Miasma’s perversities was that it made otherwise sane people like him—people who had better things they could have been doing—devote energy to arguing with completely random fuckwits, many of whom probably didn’t even believe in their own arguments, some of whom weren’t even humans.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Captain considered it, and shrugged. "It seems right," he said. "It is not precisely what El wanted; but enthroned as he is in his Palace, viewing the Land from a high seat, he does not see its complexity. This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about it new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about in new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“If it weren’t for the obvious drawbacks, I would recommend that everyone go crazy at least once in their lifetime,” El said. “It’s the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done. Going about it mindfully requires diligent effort. A”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“At any rate the total number of persons at the table was not enormously larger than the number of categories, meaning that nearly everyone present was reacting in an altogether different way, and in most cases doing so rather strongly, leading to a pandemonium of fainting, screaming, knife waving, malicious glaring, furious remonstration, hand-clapping delight, dismay, judicious beard stroking, etc. to say nothing of secondary interactions, as when a knife waver collided with a screamer.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“The commerce seemed to be one-way; nothing was being produced in Ameristan that was desired outside of it. Zula, Sophia’s mother, had spoken once about the way that Midwestern farmers had slowly, over generations, beggared themselves by producing commodities. She and Jake had gone in together on a few business ventures intended to create distinct local brands that, like the various cheeses of France, might fetch higher prices in coastal grocery stores: producing pancetta instead of bacon, and so on. But chemistry was chemistry. Ethanol was ethanol, high-fructose corn syrup was high-fructose corn syrup, and so on. So economic competition here was a war of all against all, and the only winners were people in cities who wanted to buy that stuff for as little money as possible.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Eventually the visitors were treated to a thoroughly non-ironic dinner at an Applebee’s.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Yes. It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed,” Enoch said, “and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/ seven in their own personalized hallucination stream.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“And souls, it seemed, were powerful things in their own right, with a kind of inertia about them, not easily moved. Particularly when all of them had to be moved in a kind of unison, all agreeing as to the shape of what was being made despite seeing it from many different points of view. As if all things in the world were webbed together by bands that had to stretch or break in order for change to occur, and those bands were woven by the perceptions of souls.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Speech is aggression Every utterance has a winner and a loser Curiosity is feigned Lying is performative Stupidity is power”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“They had emerged, abruptly and conclusively, from Glenwood Canyon and come out into a more open valley containing the crossroads town of Glenwood Springs. From here a highway doubled back east toward the elite paradise of Aspen. Travelers who, like them, chose to continue west toward Utah were confronted by an animated mushroom cloud rising from the interstate’s median.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

“Each of them encoding someone’s pet theory as to how the brain works. It’s no surprise you spent the whole summer just getting oriented.”
― Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell