Quotes from Seveneves

“THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“any event largely organized by elementary school teachers was likely to come off extremely well from a logistical and crowd-control standpoint.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Fighting isn’t about knowing how. It’s about deciding to.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Apparently the part of the brain that identified things as funny kept running as a background process even when its contributions were useless.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Being right does not always bring satisfaction,”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“All the people saying mean things about me on the Internet are gonna be dead in four hundred and thirty-three days,” she said, deadpan.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I’d rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“It wasn’t just a matter of hiding what you really felt. If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you. A”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“She just didn’t think it decent to live in a place where there were no coffee shops to have breakfast in when she woke up,”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Izzy was full of people who were skewed toward the Asperger’s end of the social spectrum, and there was no better way to get them to start talking than to ask them a technical question.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“boys had been programmed by Darwinian selection to run around in the open chucking spears at wild animals—something”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“He was tempted to park the SUV illegally, since, according to his calculations, the authorities were not likely to catch up with him and demand payment of the parking ticket before the end of the world, but it seemed that most of the people of Seattle were still obeying the rules and so he did likewise.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“But Henry wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“It would be easier,” Doob said, “if I could figure out what the hell she wanted.” “You’re assuming,” Luisa said, “that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child’s life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can’t, and needn’t, know every last little thing. They just have to accept this, be content with what they can glean on their own, and move on.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder’s torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

“Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Seveneves

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.”
― William Styron, quote from The Confessions of Nat Turner

“I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.”
― Marya Hornbacher, quote from Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“What can you do how much can you give to bring grace and salvation unto even one soul”
― Bree Despain, quote from The Dark Divine

“See, even though Jesse's a ghost, and can walk through walls and disappear and reappear at will, he's still...well, there. To me, anyway. That's what makes me-and Father Dom-different from everybody else. We not only can see and talk to ghosts, but we can feel them too-just as if they were anybody else. Anybody alive, I mean. Because to me and Father Dom, ghosts are just like anyone else, with blood and guts and sweat and bad breath and whatever. The only real difference is that they kind of have this glow around them-an aura, I think it's called.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Ninth Key

“He came to a decision and looked at Dagon before climbing into the car.
"Find the Disir."
Dagon stiffened, showing a rare sign of emotion. "Is that wise?" he asked.
"It is neccessary.”
― Michael Scott, quote from The Magician

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.