Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it... a speelycaptor... at something doesn't collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all their senses, mix it round in their head, and make it over into words.

Neal Stephenson
About This Quote

If you want to understand someone you should listen to them. You can never truly understand someone by just listening to the words they say. Sometimes, you need to listen to them and look at them in order to understand their meaning.

Source: Anathem

Some Similar Quotes
  1. V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love. - Jess C. Scott

  2. There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it. - Shannon L. Alder

  3. My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism. - Jess C. Scott

  4. I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do – to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited... - Jess C. Scott

  5. When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead. - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

More Quotes By Neal Stephenson
  1. Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was...

  2. Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, " I said. "We have a protractor.

  3. A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.

  4. If you can't test it, it's not theorics -- it's metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.

  5. Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?

Related Topics