Neal Stephenson, Anathem

"Technically, of course, he was right. Socially, he was annoying us."

"Topology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time."

"An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market."

"The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them."

"He had spoken with such absolute confidence that I knew he had to be blowing this out of his rectal orifice."

"... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of."

"Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways."

"Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words."

"The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money."I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there."There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators."

"They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right."

"If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy."

"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."