Cryptonomicon Quotes

“People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards.”

“Wikipedia: Cryptonomicon”

“"Shit!" he says.
"What’s wrong, Sarge?"
"I just always say that when I wake up," Shaftoe says.”

“"If you're trying to say that my relationship with the Church is very complicated, I already knew that, Bobby.””

“"I think it's better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene," Avi says. "Sometimes wanting is better than having."”

“The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!”

“He hears the flint of Julieta's lighter itching once, twice, thrice behind his ear. Then her chest pushes him up as her lungs fill with smoke.”

“Give those Finns a grim, stark, bleak moral dilemma and a bottle of schnapps and you could pretty much forget about them for forty-eight hours.”

“Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed.”

“Randy hangs up and the phone rings again almost immediately.
"Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal."”

“Swedish people are beginning to come out of their houses. They look exactly like American midwesterners, and Shaftoe's always startled when they fail to speak English.”

“Von Hacklheber shrugs and looks at the burning tip of his cigarette. "You expect them to throw all those Enigma machines away because one mathematician writes a paper?"”

“The hot rod's trunk is a ferrous, oily chasm all a'bang with tire chains, battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randy's eyes are playing tricks on him, a pair of samurai swords.”

“Enoch Root spends some time alone with Amy and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about it.”

“It goes without saying that the Finns have to have their own sui generis brand of automatic weapon.”

“Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian.”

“When Lawrence understood, it was as if the math teacher had suddenly played the good part of Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor on a pipe organ the size of the Spiral Nebula in Andromeda.”

“Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.”

“"Hey, friend!" says Mary's date. Waterhouse turns towards the sound of the voice. The sloppy grin draped across his face serves as a convenient bulls eye, and Mary's date's fist homes in on it unerringly.”

“"Haven’t seen Enoch Root recently. Did he get the radio transmitter to work?"
"Beats me," Shaftoe says, "but when big pieces of burning shit start falling out of the sky in my neighborhood, makes me wonder."”