Cryptonomicon

“Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.”

“Long pipes made low notes, short high. The tops of the pipes defined a graph: not a straight line but an upward-tending curve. The organist/math teacher sat down with a few loose pipes, a pencil, a paper, and helped Lawrence figure out why. When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda.”

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be -- or to be indistinguishable from -- self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”

“But what if it isn't that clear-cut? What if the action is one that would merely be really improbable unless the Americans were breaking the code? What if the Americans, in the long run, are just too damn lucky?”

“One evening when Avi and his family had been over for dinner, Randy had said, "I'm the beard, Avi's the suit," as a way of explaining their business relationship, and from that point Charlene had been off and running. Charlene has recently finished a scholarly article, deconstructing beards.”

“"So, you're the UNIX guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words. Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX.”

“The "sir, yes sir" business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. ...he has come to understand the [military] culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.”

“Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable.”

“Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed.”

“"Shit!" he says."I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.”

“TURING is such a visual magazine that it cannot be viewed without the protection of welding goggles, and so they insisted on a picture. A photographer was dispatched to the Crypt, which was found visually wanting. A tizzy ensued. The photographer was diverted to Manila Bay where he captured Randy standing on a boat deck next to a big reel of orange cable....”

“Randy watches them in turn: Bad Suit Asians and Good Suit Asians. The former have grizzled buzz cuts and nicotine-tanned skin and look like killers. They are wearing bad suits, not because they can't afford good ones, but because they don't give a shit. They are from China.”

“He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.”

“It goes without saying that the Finns have to have their own sui generis brand of automatic weapon.”

“Haven’t seen Enoch Root recently. What has he been up to...?" "Beats me," Shaftoe says, "but when big pieces of burning shit start falling out of the sky in my neighborhood, makes me wonder.”

“Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours.”

“"So let me get this straight," Shaftoe says, "when you really were fucking Julieta, you said you weren't and so you were able to remain a priest. Now you're going to marry her and not fuck her and say that you are.“"If you're trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very complicated, I already knew that, Bobby.””

“A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Russian engineer to design you a shoe, and he'll give you something that looks like the box the shoe came in. Ask him to design something that will slaughter Germans, and he turns into Thomas fucking Edison.”

“Swedish people are beginning to come out of their houses. They look exactly like American midwesterners, and Shaftoe's always startled when they fail to speak English.”

“Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a fifty caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.”

“Many of the females wouldn’t talk to him it all, or would come near him only the better to fix him with frosty glares and appraise his presumed new girlfriend. This only stands to reason, since, before she left for Yale, Charlene had the better part of a year to popularize her version of events. She has been able to structure the discourse to her advantage, just like a dead white male.”

“... the hot rod's trunk, a ferrous, oily chasm all a'bang with tire chains, battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randy's eyes are playing tricks on him, a pair of samurai swords.”

“One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept — because everybody's been there— but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it." "It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic.”

“Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.”

“I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that horrible?" "We can all do it.”

“"We make our way in the world by knowing that two plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of nerdy and that maybe hurts people's feelings sometimes. I'm sorry.”"Like, for example . . . female people?””

“They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again... a few strands of fossil DNA broken out of their amber shells and released in the world again ... if they flourish, it should make Randy's life a little more interesting. Not that it's devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones.”

“That time in Seattle--during the lawsuit--was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive.”

“Well," Avi says, "to begin with, I think it's better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene." "Sometimes wanting is better than having.”

“"Randy, get this through your head. The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine. The Dentist doesn't give a shit about the submarine.”"So, I am going to replace this cassette," Avi says, popping the tape out of the machine, "and start driving really really fast.””

“He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder.”

“It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral. ... The speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he's been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his conversational stride.”

“"You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not.”"Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices, who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron.””

“According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields, raising their eyes longingly towards those cool mountains as they stooped in sweltering fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory.”

“"Jesus! Haven't you guys spent any time at all around people like Comstock? Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?"'”

“"You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war, which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild, the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary. ... A lot of people think that the Primary is still waiting to be discovered.””

“Someone is trying to send you a message," Attorney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client. Randy's ready for it. "Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have e-mail?”

“You know what this is? It's one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things." "Then I won't.”

“People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards.”

“But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build things.”

“An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous.”