The hot rods trunk is a ferrous, oily chasm all abang with tire chains — Cryptonomicon

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

"Shaftoe thinks that he has never seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone-faced Chinese women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers explode all around them. Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with baby fat and streaked with tears."

"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 guy in the corner kept reading poetry. For perhaps ten seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, Shaftoe actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a vicious racial brawl."

"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."