Books

"Kath Two was the sort of person whose caches were apt to be crammed with paper books. For her, the electronic books were an insurance policy of sorts. The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read."

"But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem -- Fermats Last Theorem."

"A grave thort strike me:ALL BOOKS WHICH BOYS HAV TO READ ARE WRONG"

"An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed."

"Ten hostages is terrorism; A million, and its strategy. To ban books is fanaticism; To threaten in totality All culture and all civilization, All humankind and all creation, This is a task of decorous skill And needs high statesmanship and will."

"Books aint no good. A guy needs somebody — to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he aint got nobody."

"Perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest. One is never set at rest by Mr. Henry Jamess novels. His books end as an episode in life ends. You remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read. It is eminently satisfying, but it is not final. Mr. Henry James, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the impossible."

"Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from becoming a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, compose our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation."

"[Henry] Kissinger has always been a paradox for me. I was profoundly impressed by his book about European politics in the first half of the last century. One of his main theses was that peace agreements are valueless if a major party to the conflict is left out and sees in the agreement a threat to its basic interests. If ever this rule were true – as it surely is – this is the case with the Palestinians in the Middle East conflict. It is also true for the Soviet Union. Yet once he became the political genius of the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger behaved as if he had never read his own book – the classic example of power blinding the intellectual. He tried to make peace of some kind without the Palestinians, treating the rulers of the various Arab countries as so many Metternichs and Castlereaghs, trying to push the Soviets out of the Middle East altogether. I strongly suspected him of obstructing any real move towards peace, favoring the salami approach of little pieces of peace, so as to keep everybody screaming for American support and dependent on American protection. This was the famous step-by-step approach."

"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. (24)"

"The crimson monads of the deep, The flying-fish with fitful leap, Assai palms of matchless grace, The giant in the vine’s embrace,— These were his books while journeying on To read the unknown Amazon."

"[Sad ending, going to Dni without the page] Ah, my friend! Youve returned—we meet face-to-face. And the page, did you bring the page? ... [Sighs] You didnt bring the page. You didnt bring the page! [Thumps the book he is writing in, the Book of Riven, in frustration] What kind of fool are you? Ah! Did you not take my warning seriously? [Long pause] Welcome to Dni. You and I will live here ... forever."

"Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of mans inner life, even as they belong to his life in society."

"[First encounter with the player, in the green book in the Myst librarys fireplace] Who the devil are you? Dont come here to Dni—not yet. ... Oh, I have many questions for you, my friend, as you, no doubt, have for me. Where should I begin? Perhaps my story is in order. My name is Atrus. I fear youve met my sons, Sirrus and Achenar, in the red and blue books on Myst Island, in my library. My library ... it contains my works, my writings. I wrote many Books—many Books that linked me to fantastic places. Its an art I learned from my father, many years ago. Oh, but the red and blue books, those were different. I wrote those books to trap overgreedy explorers that might stumble upon my island of Myst. But I had no idea my own sons would be entrapped. My sons, Sirrus and Achenar, we had many journeys together. I gave them free rein to the Books; perhaps it was not wise. I could see the greed growing in them. I had not told them about the red and blue Books. Their imaginations went wild; they dreamed of riches and powers. Of course, they did not know the Books were traps. They begged me for access to those Books, and I, of course, denied them. They devised a plan, an evil plan. I had no idea to what extent their greed had progressed. Their own mother ... they used their own mother—oh, my dear Catherine—to lure me here, to Dni. Of course, I could return to Myst, except that they removed a single page from my Myst Linking Book; I cannot return without that page. You, my friend, can bring that page to me. Oh, I pray that you believe my story above the lies my sons have told you. If you could find it in yourself to return that page to me, here in Dni, I could go to Myst and bring justice to my sons for what they have done. I must return to my writing. I pray that you believe me. Please hurry, bring the page. Bring the page with you."

"A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will."

"The problems and possibilities associated with the emergence of a global consumerist ethos is one with which scholars have only just begun to come to grips. For much of the past century, beginning with Thorstein Veblen’s investigation of conspicuous consumption in 1899, anxieties about commodity culture were treated as national or Western rather than global concerns. They have been explored in articles and books on a dizzying array of themes and topics, and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Attempts to make analytic sense of the impact and significance of consumerism on modern cultures have been complicated from the outset by normative considerations – either of a moralizing character or by concerns about consumerism as a form of social control – as well as by the role played by consumerism in the rise of ‘mass’ societies. When these long-standing anxieties about consumption and consumerism are set against the space of the entire globe, coming to clear conclusions about its impact on global and local social relations is made even more difficult. The idea of consumerism as a form of social control, for example, blends easily into existing discourses of economic and cultural imperialism; what is described as ‘Americanism’ is often the threat of a consumer culture associated with US society. 7 Expressed more structurally, the addition of new global communication technologies and the increasing role of techno-scientific inquiry (labelled R&D) in the production of goods, have intersected with and altered practices of production and exchange, further multiplying the difficulties of accounting for consumption and consumerism in the world today."

"Slashdot reader: In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win? Stephenson: You dont have to settle for mere idle speculation...The first time was a year or two after Snow Crash came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake...I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us...The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while...The second time, when Gibson came through Seattle on his Idoru tour, he devastated my quarter of the city...As a stalemate developed we began to resort more and more to the use of pure energy, modulated by Red Lotus incantations of the third Sung group..."

"His formidable originality within the picture-book convention may not have been altogether apparent to Keeping himself, which is both a strength and a weakness: the strength that he could communicate with unrivalled emotional intensity — but possibly only with one child in twenty; the concomitant weakness is that there was not a lot he could do to broaden this minority appeal and ensure that his books remained in print over longer periods. ~ Douglas Martin in Charles Keeping: an illustrators life (1993) he is a good auther"

"The older you get, the humbler you get. I know I dont have that much to offer, and I know Ive now read Moby Dick and Anna Karenina, and if I had read those books before I wrote The Hottest State, I dont think Id have published it. I had the arrogance of the uneducated, which sometimes you need."

"There is scarcely any one who states purely arithmetical questions, scarcely any who understands them. Is this not because arithmetic has been treated up to this time geometrically rather than arithmetically? This certainly is indicated by many works ancient and modern. Diophantus himself also indicates this. But he has freed himself from geometry a little more than others have, in that he limits his analysis to rational numbers only; nevertheless the Zetcica of Vieta, in which the methods of Diophantus are extended to continuous magnitude and therefore to geometry, witness the insufficient separation of arithmetic from geometry. Now arithmetic has a special domain of its own, the theory of numbers. This was touched upon but only to a slight degree by Euclid in his Elements, and by those who followed him it has not been sufficiently extended, unless perchance it lies hid in those books of Diophantus which the ravages of time have destroyed. Arithmeticians have now to develop or restore it. To these, that I may lead the way, I propose this theorem to be proved or problem to be solved. If they succeed in discovering the proof or solution, they will acknowledge that questions of this kind are not inferior to the more celebrated ones from geometry either for depth or difficulty or method of proof: Given any number which is not a square, there also exists an infinite number of squares such that when multiplied into the given number and unity is added to the product, the result is a square."