# Quote — Neal Stephenson, Zodiac

> 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.

- Author: [Neal Stephenson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson.md)
- Book: [Zodiac](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac.md)
- Page: 30
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson#Zodiac_(1988)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac/in-four-years

## More from this book

> 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)