You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war, which w — 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!"

"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."

"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."