# Quote — Neal Stephenson, Zodiac

> 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.

- Author: [Neal Stephenson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson.md)
- Book: [Zodiac](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neal-stephenson/zodiac.md)
- Page: 205
- 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/there-was-a-white

## 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)