Neal Stephenson Quotes

I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.

I can understand the dilemma of growing up in a bubble, and then not knowing what to do when unemployment beckons and reality bursts in.

People idealize or reminisce about their 20s, but nobody tells you beforehand that it's hard and unglamorous and often very unpleasant.

It was a recession when I graduated, but I was so unequipped to have a job anyway, I don't think it would have mattered if the economy was booming. I think I was expecting bad jobs. But as it went on through my 20s, I began to wonder how things were going to turn out.

It's just as easy for me to be building a fence somewhere and scraping by on unemployment in between doing a guest star spot. I've been there.

I moved back home after graduating from Virginia Tech. And that's when reality hit. I knew I had to do something. I guess it doesn't click when you're that young. I was 19 and had finished college. I got home and had to figure out what I was going to do.

Making your band your career just seems like a pipe dream when it's not happening, and when it does, it seems so surreal.

It's a fine line between Saturday night and Sunday morning.

I know that it's very dispiriting for people in their twenties, who expected to graduate from college, get their own apartments, get a job, and move forward with their lives, and in fact are still now living with Mom and Dad, which is challenging for all involved.

The song 'If I Had a Hammer' is geared toward people who don't have a hammer. Maybe before I had a hammer I thought I'd hammer in the morning and hammer in the evening. But once you get a hammer, you find you don't really hammer as much as you thought you would.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.

I seldom went to bed before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night.

He liked cheap women, fast cars, late nights, and hard liquor, especially all together. In Jack's view, you are obliged to sin on Saturday night so you'd have something to atone for Sunday morning. Otherwise, you'd be putting the preacher out of business.

I read that nine out of 10 women fantasize about having an unknown man leap through their bedroom window at night and make mad, passionate love to them. Who would think with those odds, I would now be facing 150 hours of community service.

Cause' I don't wanna' spend my life jaded, waiting to wake up one day and find that I've let all these years go by wasted. Oh I don't wanna' keep on wishing, missing, but still every morning the color of the night, I ain't spending no more time wasted.

It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn't so.

Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.

He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him.

The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

The new Galliano will be even bigger and better... I love working, it's my therapy. I can draw until four in the morning every night and not feel tired... I've come face to face with my demons, medicine and alcohol. I have rebuilt myself again.

I wanted to see you again, touch you, know who you were, see if I would find you identical with the ideal image of you which had remained with me and perhaps shatter my dream with the aid of reality. -Claude Frollo

The process of illusion & disillusionment is part of life and goes on endlessly.

When young, you're shocked by the number of people who turn out to have feet of clay. Older, you're surprised by the number of people who don't.

Miranda in Miranda's sight is old, gray and dirty; Twenty-nine she was last night; This morning she is thirty.

I want to try with someone who loves me enough to try with me. I want to grow old looking at the same face every morning. I want to grow old looking at the same face every night at the dinner table. I want to be one of those old couples you see still holding hands and laughing after fifty years of marriage. That's what I want. I want to be someone's forever.