Snow Crash Quotes
"Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night."
"A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door."
"The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry."
"The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear."
"Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue."
"This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that?"
"There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery."
"Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
"Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry."
"Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics."
"The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness."
"He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor."
"It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea."
"Other people just rely on plain old competition."
"You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life."
"That's why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra."
"A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything."
"Said that he had violated the SPAC, the Suspected Perpetrator Apprehension Code."
"Almost everything is on the line, except, perhaps, your life."
"It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear."
"The billboard serves as the Deliverator's polestar."
"The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors."
"The world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it."
"The whole interior of the car lights up as they drive past a Buy 'n' Fly."
"MetaCops aren't allowed to lean against their Unit—makes them look lazy and weak."
"The Hoosegow looks like a nice new one. Y.T. has seen hotels that were worse places to sleep."
"Sorry, boys, we’re full up. No space for females tonight."
"Better take her uniform—all that gear," the second MetaCop suggests, not unlewdly.
"Where you from?" Y.T. asks. "Tadzhikistan," he says.
"Daemon" is an old piece of jargon from the UNIX operating system.
"You saw the whole thing," Da5id says. "A fixed-pattern of black-and-white pixels, fairly high-resolution. Just a few hundred thousand ones and zeroes for me to look at."
"Why would anyone show me information in binary code? I'm not a computer. I can't read a bitmap."
"It's my pleasure to welcome all quality folks to visiting of Hong Kong."
"Didn't anyone tell you," he says, losing the dialect, "that I was a hacker?"
"I'm tired," Mom says. It's what she always says.
"Disposal of hacked-up avatars is taken care of by Graveyard Daemons, a new Metaverse feature that Hiro had to invent."
"Even as Hiro is stepping back from the hacked-up body of his former opponent, they are emerging from invisible trapdoors."
"The Graveyard Daemons will take the avatar to the Pyre, an eternal, underground bonfire beneath the center of The Black Sun, and burn it."
"As soon as the flames consume the avatar, it will vanish from the Metaverse."
"He peels off his goggles and finds himself standing in the parking lot of the U-Stor-It, holding a naked katana."
"Vitaly Chernobyl is standing in the open door of their 20-by-30. His hairdo is backlighted."
"I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world."
"Technically speaking, the pond should be full of carp, but Hiro is American enough to think of carp as inedible dinosaurs."
"The Librarian is the only piece of CIC software that costs even more than Earth."
"Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means God."
"So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city."
"The tower is described, literally, as ‘its top with the heavens.'"
"Raven makes a couple of broad, lazy sweeps along the perimeter of the crowd, going very slowly, looking in all directions."
"Jason has been given a priority job to deliver his records to the very franchise where Uncle Enzo will be taking his espresso this afternoon!"
"All Jason had to do was find contractors to handle all of those jobs before he goes home that night, or else he has to take care of them himself."
"As soon as he came up here—They betrayed his position."
"It's a dangerous world. Getting more dangerous all the time."
"Swords make quick cuts, all the way through. Like, you cut off a head or an arm."
"He is running down the center of the pulsating neon street toward the center of Chinatown, wailing a terrible, random song."
"The only ones left in the city are street people, feeding off debris; immigrants, thrown out like shrapnel from the destruction of the Asian powers; young bohos; and the technomedia priesthood of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong."
"All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us."
"The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another."
"The sound of a helicopter has been getting louder for some minutes now. Even though Hiro lives right next to the airport, this is unusual."
"He is about to bury himself in it, become a single muddy pixel in some airline passenger's window."
"The Pharisees were hassling him because they were religiously very strict. They adhered to a strong legalistic version of the religion; to them, the Law was everything."
"Pentecostal Christians think so, but they are deluding themselves. Pagan Greeks did it—Plato called it theomania."
"‘And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.'"
"In olden times, you'd wander down to Mom's Cafe for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home."
"Computers rely on the one and zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing—this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing—is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths."
"Even the word ‘science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut' or ‘to separate.'"
"They lived communally and believed that physical and spiritual cleanliness were intimately connected."
"‘Nam-shub is a word from Sumerian.' ‘Sumerian?' ‘Yes, sir. Used in Mesopotamia until roughly 2000 B.C. The oldest of all written languages.'"
"‘This envelope contains the nam-shub of Enki.'"
"‘Once upon a time, there was no snake, there was no scorpion, there was no hyena, there was no lion, there was no wild dog, no wolf, there was no fear, no terror, man had no rival.'"
"‘My god, it is you I fear. I have written you a letter. Take pity on me.'"
"‘Instead of hiring a large human security force—which impacts the social environment—you know, lots of minimum-wage earners standing around carrying machine guns—Mr. Lee prefers to use nonhuman systems.'"
"‘Thank you, all my needs are taken care of,' Ng says."
"‘America is wonderful because you can get anything on a drive-through basis. Oil change, liquor, banking, car wash, funerals, anything you want—drive through! So this vehicle is much better than a tiny pathetic wheelchair. It is an extension of my body.'"
"‘I was able to reach an American aircraft carrier off the coast, but you know, the fuel was spraying around quite a bit during the fire.'"
"‘My helicopter caught fire during the evacuation of Saigon in 1974—a stray tracer from ground forces.'"
"‘I tried prostheses for a while—some of them are very good. But nothing is as good as a motorized wheelchair.'"
"‘In the park,' with my friends. ‘We're helping to spread the Word.'"
"‘I was a systems programmer for 3verse Systems in Mountain View, California,' the woman says."
"The only thing that forced us out—the only way those maniacs were able to seize power—was just totally, you know—How could you have expected something like that?"
"All the mailboxes have been unbolted and used to decorate the apartments of nostalgia freaks."
"Names are unimportant. Everyone knows Kouriers are interchangeable parts."
"If you want to deal with the Feds, why not use their fucked-up mail system?"
"The smaller this country gets, the more paranoid they become."
"The ridiculous cascade of white marble steps on the front of the building just gives her more ramp time."
"As she's swinging out across the broad avenue, aiming her crosshairs at the customs post a quarter mile away, which she is going to have to jump over, something tells her to look up."
"She can see the muzzle flash poke out of it, wreathed in a sudden doughnut of white smoke."
"The next quarter of a second: There's no bright flash to blind her, and so she can actually see the shock wave spreading outward in a perfect sphere, hard and palpable as a ball of ice."
"Above it, the shock wave hangs in the air, rushing toward her at the speed of sound, a lens of air that flattens and refracts everything on the other side."
"In the meantime, there may be a role for individuals who know their way around the place."
"Most of programming is a matter of laying groundwork, building structures of words that seem to have no particular connection to the task at hand."
"It's not always easy to read the level when you're out to sea."
"Russians fucked us over . . . smallpox had a ninety-percent mortality rate."
"Fucking Nipponese took away my father in forty-two, put him in a POW camp for the duration."
"We're all in this together, right? We're all part of Lagos's gang."
"The Nipponese say they're the only people who were ever nuked. But every nuclear power has one aboriginal group whose territory they nuked to test their weapons."
"That's also when I learned how to make love to a woman—which is the only thing I do better than harpooning."
"We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition."
"It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how."
"Once he converts you to his religion, he can control you with me. And he can convert millions of people to his religion because it spreads like a fucking virus—people have no resistance to it because no one is used to thinking about religion, people aren't rational enough to argue about this kind of thing."
"The message was changed to a form of idolatry. In this new version of the gospels, Jesus came back to earth and organized a church, which later became the Church of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire—another rigid, brutal, and irrational theocracy."