Quotes from Quicksilver

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man’s work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle--all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe--for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“You mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?"
"The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long, they simply say it in Latin.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“The Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world."
"And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“But when you walk through yonder gate,” Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, “you’ll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. ’Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You’re a Bishop, and I’m a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light ’Tis difficult to make out your true shade.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,” Dr. Waterhouse reminds him.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac’s meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“I'll buy it right now, Jack," said an English voice, somehow familiar, "if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“These simple terms—“come about,” for example—denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for an evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“No, rebellion is what the Duke of Monmouth did, it is a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva’s hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady suck-and-hiss that’s like the systole and diastole of a beating heart.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“to insist on everything’s being reasonable, in a world that wasn’t, was, in itself, unreasonable.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it—which must have been a great spiritual struggle—and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Magical?" "Non." "Magnificent?" "Don't be absurd." "Less bleak than anything else we have seen?" "Now truly you are speaking French," the ambassador said approvingly.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“[Enoch Root] hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things—hangings included—with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships.
(Boston Common, October 12, 1713, 10:33:52 a.m.)”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

“Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own run up onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start. But each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of gray foam, and got buried under the next. The end result of all their noisy, pounding, repetitious efforts was the beach. Seen through a lens, the particular arrangement of sand-grains that made up the beach presumably was complicated, and reflected the individual contributions of every single wave that had ended its life here; but seen from the level of Eliza’s head it was unspeakably flat,”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from Quicksilver

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Popular quotes

“The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Song Is You

“Destiny isn't a path that any cat follows blindly. It is always a matter of choice, and sometimes the heart speaks loudest.”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Sign of the Moon

“Did you think I – I would be able to carry on, without you?” I sob, my voice muffled against his shoulder. “Did you think I’d manage to get through this thing called life without you by my side?”

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“Autumn air is good for the lungs.”
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