American Novels

"The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!"

"There are many Lesser phyles and three Great ones. "What are the Great ones?" "New Atlantis," Nell began. "Nippon," said Fiona. "Han," they concluded together. "That is correct," Miss Matheson said. "We traditionally include Han in the list because of its immense size and age—even though it has lately been crippled by intestine discord. And some would include Hindustan, while others would view it as a riotously diverse collection of microtribes sintered together according to some formula we don't get."

"Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defense. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten. New Atlantis, like many tribes, propagates itself largely through education. That is the raison d'être of this Academy."

"It was a bit too aggressive to be a reverie and too abstract to be a hallucination."

"It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together," Miss Matheson said. "That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. She is like an avatar — do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and well defended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken."

"As far as the laws of probability, my lady, these cannot be broken, any more than any other mathematical principle. But laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams."

"During her first few weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years."

"They went across the playing fields…the two girls walking and Miss Matheson's wheelchair carrying her along on its many-spoked smart wheels. "Chiselled Spam," Miss Matheson said, sort of mumbling it to herself. "Pardon me, Miss Matheson?" Nell said. "I was just watching the smart wheels and remembering an advertisement from my youth," Miss Matheson said. "I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bumps and bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid.""

"So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world."

"One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept — because everybody's been there— but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it." "Which is still kind of pathetic." "It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's something else."

"It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost — swallowed up in the ocean — unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes."

"What does it really mean when such a young person moves to another phyle? It means that they have outgrown youthful credulity and no longer wish to belong to a tribe simply because it is the path of least resistance—they have developed principle, they are concerned with their personal integrity."

"They only have one book in Sendero, and it tells them to burn all the other books."

"“Have you done anything the Shanghai Police might find interesting?” Brad asked Harv gravely. Harv said no, a simple no without the usual technicalities, provisos, and subclauses."

""Sorry," she said, "I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know." "Explain protocol," Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer. "At the place we're going, you need to watch your manners. Don't say 'explain this' or 'explain that.'" "Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?" Nell said. Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm."

"High up the mountain before them, they could see St. Mark's Cathedral and hear its bells ringing changes, mostly just tuneless sequences of notes, but sometimes a pretty melody would tumble out, like an unexpected gem from the permutations of the I Ching."

"In an era when everything can be surveiled, all we have left is politeness."

"Hackworth had fixed his gaze, for no special reason, on a tall bottle with a paper label printed in an ancient crabbed typeface: "MCWHORTER'S ORIGINAL CONDIMENT" The neck of the bottle was also festooned with black-and-white reproductions of ancient medals awarded by pre-Enlightenment European monarchs at exhibitions in places like Riga…If the manifest of ingredients on the bottle had been legible, it would have read something like this: Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, singlemalt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain deaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings."

"Did the Primer teach you that people would pull your hair?" "No, Sir." "Did it teach you that your mother's boyfriends would beat you up, and your mother not protect you?" "No, sir, except insofar as it told me stories about people who did evil." "People doing evil is a good lesson. What you saw in there a few weeks ago"—and by this Nell knew he was referring to the headless soldier on the mediatron—"is one application of that lesson, but it's too obvious to be of any use. Ah, but your mother not protecting you from boyfriends—that has some subtlety, doesn't it?"

"”So, if the Shanghainese gentleman were to request that our engineer partake in activities that we would normally consider unethical or even treasonous, we might take an uncharacteristically forgiving stance. Providing, that is, that the engineer kept us well-informed.” ”Would that be something like being a double agent, then?” Hackworth said. Napier winced, as if he were being caned himself. ”It is a crashingly unsubtle phrase. But I can forgive your using it in this context.” ”Would John Zaibatsu then make some kind of formal commitment to this arrangement?” ”It is not done that way,” Major Napier said. ”I was afraid of that,"”Hackworth said. ”Typically such commitments are superfluous, as in most cases the party has very little choice in the matter.” ”Yes,” Hackworth said, ”I see what you mean.”"

"If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy."

"If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times."

"He had fixed his gaze, for no special reason, on a tall bottle with a paper label printed in an ancient crabbed typeface. "McWhorter's Original Condiment " was written large, and everything else was too small to read. The neck of the bottle was also festooned with black-and -white reproductions of ancient medals awarded by pre-Enlightenment European monarchs at exhibitions in places like Riga. Just a bit of violent shaking and thwacking ejected a few spurts of the ochre slurry from the pore-size orifice at the top of the bottle, which was guarded by a quarter inch encrustation. Most of it hit his plate, and some impacted on his sandwich."

"But as many first-time fathers had realized in the delivery room, there was something about the sight of an actual baby that focused the mind. In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby."

"The difference between stupid and intelligent people — and this is true whether or not they are well-educated — is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations — in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."

"“Yet how am I to cultivate the persons of the barbarians for whom I have perversely been given responsibility?" … "The Master stated in his Great Learning that the extension of knowledge was the root of all other virtues." "I cannot send the boy to school, Chang." "Think instead of the girl," Chang said, "the girl and her book.""

"“The Indians of the American Southwest called him Coyote, those of the Pacific Coast called him Raven. Europeans called him Reynard the Fox. African-Americans called him Br'er Rabbit. In twentieth-century literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the Hacker." "When I was a lad, that word had a double meaning. It could mean a trickster who broke into things—but it could also mean an especially skilled coder." "The ambiguity is common in post-Neolithic cultures," Hackworth said. "As technology became more important, the Trickster underwent a shift in character and became the god of crafts — of technology, if you will — while retaining the underlying roguish qualities. So we have the Sumerian Enki, the Greek Prometheus and Hermes, Norse Loki, and so on.”"

"“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,“ Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception---he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.“"

"The seed of this idea had been germinating in Hackworth's mind for some months now but had not bloomed, for the same reason that none of his ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness. Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, the embodiment of the Victorian establishment, was a subversive…now he was trying to subvert his own granddaughter."

"What's a matter compiler?" "We call it the M.C. for short." "Why?" "Because M.C. stands for matter compiler, or so they say." "Why?" "It just does. In letters, I guess." "What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphics except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use 'em to make short words for long words."

"We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations."

""And what makes one man's life more interesting than another’s?" "In general, I should say that we find unpredictable or novel things more interesting." …"You yourself said that the engineers in the Bespoke department—the very best—had led interesting lives, rather than coming from the straight and narrow. Which implies a correlation, does it not?” "Clearly." "This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting.”"

"Apthorp was not a formal organization that could be looked up in a phone book; in financial cant, it referred to a strategic alliance of several immense companies, including Machine-Phase Systems Limited and Imperial Tectonics Limited. ... MPS made consumer goods and ITL made real estate, which was, as ever, where the real money was. Counted by the hectare, it didn't amount to much...but it was the most expensive real estate in the world outside of a few blessed places like Tokyo, San Francisco, and Manhattan. ...every new piece of land possessed the charms of Frisco, the strategic location of Manhattan, the feng-shui of Hong Kong, the dreary but obligatory Lebensraum of L.A. It was no longer necessary to send out dirty yokels in coonskin caps to chart the wilderness, kill the abos, and clear-cut the groves...."

"He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one’s life accordingly."

"Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona."

"Nell stands above the fray and thinks," Finkle-McGraw said. "To the other girls, the wall is a decorative feature, no? A pretty thing to run to and explore. But not to Nell. Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls. Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting."

"Along with many other Midwesterners, Finkle-McGraw put in a few weeks building levees out of sandbags and plastic sheeting. Once again he was struck by the national media coverage—reporters from the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with some bewilderment, that there had been no looting. ... Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced."

"The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun."

"Bud's relationship with the female sex was governed by a gallimaufry of primal impulses, dim suppositions, deranged theories, overheard scraps of conversation, half-remembered pieces of bad advice, and fragments of no-doubt exaggerated anecdotes that amounted to rank superstition."

""Your case is very serious," he said to the boy. "We will go and consult the ancient authorities…." The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices. It had been the first fast-food franchise established on the Bund, many decades earlier."

"“It’s the only punishment that seems to sink in—we employ it with some frequency.” “Then perhaps it is not sinking in as well as you suppose,” Lord Finkle-McGraw said, looking sad and sounding bemused."

"Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity."

"Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and understands that people need to think out loud."

"I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that horrible?" "September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her." "Wow." "Girl talk." "I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk." "We can all do it."

"Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news…It did not enter his calculations that being on the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never wants to leave the jungle."

"But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build things."

"An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous."

"Enoch Root spends some time alone with Amy and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about it."

"Now in many other mythologies you can find gods that have parallels with Athena,” Enoch says. “The Sumerians had Enki, the Norse had Loki. Loki was an inventor god, but psychologically he had more in common with Ares…Native Americans had tricksters — creatures full of cunning like Coyote and Raven — in their mythologies, but they didn't have technology yet, and so they hadn't coupled the Trickster with Crafts to generate this hybrid Technologist god…Cunning people tend to attain power that uncunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them admire it… Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil." "Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers," Randy says. "That's right. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena."

"People smell all kinds of ways before they have burned, but only one way afterwards."