# Zodiac

- Author: [Neal Stephenson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson.md)
- Quotes: 27
- Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac

## Quotes

> Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.
>
> It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure I have, yet.

p. 88 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/talking-to-cancer.md)

> Every large corporation has its own telephone maze, its juicy numbers and dead ends, its nickel-plated bitch queens and sugary do-gooders.

p. 78 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/every-large-corporation.md)

> And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco's pipes was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed.... That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken, but if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably outraged.

p. 19 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/and-i-hadnt.md)

> Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. “Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of material—they write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé.”
>
> “Isn’t that the whole point of heavy metal?”
>
> “Yeah. I’m the one who told you that,” he reminded me. “Heavy metal will never leave you behind.”

p. 103 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/bartholomew-was-a-sommelier.md)

> The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.

p. 24 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/the-corporations-have.md)

> One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.

p. 10 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/one-of-the.md)

> If you’re an engineer, and you’re not very bright, it’s easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls.

p. 111 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/if-youre-an-engineer.md)

> I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather.

p. 94 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/i-was-happy.md)

> At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor, the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown.

p. 30 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/at-some-point.md)

> The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they’re constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don’t even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they’d printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it’s easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger.

p. 57 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/the-big-lie.md)

> He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.

p. 187 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/he-had-a-sense.md)

> I don’t mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of all: political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For God’s sake, they wouldn’t even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And if they don’t have the balls to take preventative measures, punitive action doesn’t even enter their minds. The laws are broken so universally that they don’t know what to do. They don’t even look for violators.

p. 57 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/i-dont-mean.md)

> I’m not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it.

p. 7 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/im-not-that.md)

> Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking....
>
> Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals....there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes.

p. 48 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/jim-and-his.md)

> “I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent,” he confessed. “Because then you’re the only person in the world who can knock down the president and get away with it.”

p. 246 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/i-always-wanted.md)

> It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land there's the Omni, but all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T — but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.

p. 29 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/its-the-ultimate.md)

> Heavy metal, drugs and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons.

p. 259 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/heavy-metal-drugs.md)

> [I] followed him past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick, new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an interesting person make.

p. 162 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/i-followed-him.md)

> He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer.

p. 87 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/he-wanted-justice.md)

> "It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture."
>
> "I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that."
>
> "Well, I wouldn't say it in public."

p. 89 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/it-might-interest.md)

> “Those guys are troglodytes,” he said, “Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle.”

p. 231 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/those-guys-are.md)

> A good yuppie has no sense of smell.

p. 301 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/a-good-yuppie.md)

> Nothing in a hardware store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.

p. 64 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/nothing-in-a-hardware.md)

> Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up.

p. 67 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/any-property-thats.md)

> In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt.

p. 30 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/in-four-years.md)

> There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. He face was ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation. When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without showing his teeth and I nodded back.

p. 205 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/there-was-a-white.md)

> “Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide—a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol—nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.”
>
> “So?”
>
> “Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do.”

p. 2 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/sangamons-principle-i-said.md)