Shaftoe thinks that he has never seen, and will never see, anything as — Cryptonomicon

"So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber," Doug Shaftoe says.…"There was a man by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties. And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use the name…a defunct reinsurance company." Doug pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil…Randy flips the envelope over…It says: WATERHOUSE LAVENDER ROSE."

"This aint just your regular Friday p.m. Shanghai bank district money rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire."

"The modern worlds hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldnt even fit that onto the second line!"

"Lets set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored."

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

"The hot rods trunk is a ferrous, oily chasm all abang with tire chains, battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randys eyes are playing tricks on him, a pair of samurai swords."