American Novels

"It was a vast open marketplace with thousands of stalls, filled with carts and runners carrying product in all directions. But no vegetables, fish, spices, or fodder were to be seen here; all the product was information written down in books.... Book-carriers bumped into each other, compared notes as to what they were carrying and where they were going, and swapped books for other books. Stacks of books were sold in great, raucous auctions—and paid for not with gold but with other books. Around the edges of the market were stalls where books were exchanged for gold, and beyond that, a few alleys where gold could be exchanged for food."

"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."

"Something red flickers in the mouth of the cave, shaped like the forked tongue of a reptile. Then a moving slab of living jungle explodes from the mouth of the cave and crashes into the foliage below. It is low to the ground, moving on all fours. It pauses for a moment and flicks its tongue towards the Imperial Marine who is now hobbling into the Pacific Ocean some fifty feet distant."

"“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."

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

"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."

""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."

"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."

"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."

""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.”"

"“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 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."

"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."

"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...."

"“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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

""You know something?" fires back Doug. "During the Vietnam war, which was Old Man Comstock's brainchild, the American military presence in the Philippines was huge. That son of a bitch had soldiers and marines crawling over Luzon, supposedly on training missions. But I think they were looking for something. I think they were looking for the Primary.”"

"Another thing he did this morning was to download the current version of the Cryptonomicon from the ftp server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's never looked at it in detail, but he has heard it contains samples of code, or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the very latest public code breaking techniques in the Cryptonomicon might match up to the classified technology that Pontifex and his colleagues were employing at the NSA thirty years ago."

"The sample messages used [in the Cryptonomicon] are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn't know what "hokey" meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families… Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff."

""Jesus! Can't you recognize bullshit? Don't you think it would be a useful item to add to your intellectual toolkits to be capable of saying, when a ton of wet steaming bullshit lands on your head, 'My goodness, this appears to be bullshit'?"'"

""You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not.” "Why do you say that?” "Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices, who never has to exert his mind.”"

"Randy hangs up and the phone rings again almost immediately. "Who the fuck are you?" Doug Shaftoe says, "I call you on the airplane, and I get a busy signal.""

"Someone is trying to send you a message," Attorney Alejandro says, scant minutes into his first interview with his new client. Randy's ready for it. "Why does everyone here have these incredibly cumbersome ways of sending me messages? Don't you people have e-mail?"

"According to their family lore, the first Shaftoes to come to America worked as indentured servants in tobacco and cotton fields. As soon as they could get away, they did, and headed uphill. The mountains of Luzon beckon Shaftoe in the same way away from the malarial lowlands, up towards Glory."

"He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder."

"That time in Seattle was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX." "Well, that's something," Avi says. "Normally those two are mutually exclusive."

"I think it's better to aspire to having Amy than to actually have Charlene," Avi says. "Sometimes wanting is better than having."

"They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again. If they flourish, it should make Randy's life a little more interesting. Not that it's devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones."

"You know what this is? It's one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things." "I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying." "It's one of those American books where once you're heard the title you don't even need to read it," Randy says. "Then I won't."

"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."

"Grandmother has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for having wasted her time. "It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual," Randy says, "for a man to be in both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it's one or the other.” "Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform," Grandmother says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a large intestine, "and he would wear whichever one was appropriate.” "Of course he would," Randy says."

"It is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that Randy doesn't know what to make of it for a while. When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, "You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?" Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral."

"Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's widow and five children agree that Dad did something in the war, and that's about all. There is not even agreement on whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ."

"Until she had gotten too old to drive, Grandmother had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from Whitman's Patterson Lincoln Mercury, before his untimely death. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit, someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber colored 10W40. It eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living male lineage of the Patterson family — four generations of them — into his hospital room and wrought some kind of unspecified pact with them… So ever since, guerilla mechanic teams had been swiping her Lincoln from the church parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson's for sub rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter of a century without maintenance — without even putting gasoline in the tank — had only confirmed Grandmother's opinions about the amusing superfluity of male pursuits."

"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."

"Aunt Nina says, "How about you, Randy? As the eldest son of the eldest son, you must have some feelings about this." "No doubt when my parents' time comes, they will pass on some of Grandma and Grandpa's legacy to me," Randy says. "Oh, very circumspect. Well done," Aunt Nina says. "But as the only grandchild who has any memories of your grandfather at all, there must be something here that you might like to have." "There'll probably be some odds and ends that nobody wants," Randy says. Then like an almost perfect moron — like an organism genetically engineered to be a total, stupid idiot — Randy glances directly at the Trunk. Then he tries to hide it, which only makes it more conspicuous. Aunt Nina is walking around the trunk, kind of spiraling in towards it in a rapidly decaying orbit. "Hmm. What's in here?""

""I mean," Randy says, "from the general attitude they copped, when they fishtailed to a stop in the middle of my front yard…obviously the number one mission objective was to ensure that the flower of Shaftoe womanhood was being treated with all of the respect, decency, worshipfulness, et cetera, properly owed it.” "Oh. That's not really the vibe that I got…my family sticks together. Just 'cause we haven't seen each other for a while doesn't mean our obligations have lapsed.”"

""'Scuse me, General, Bobby Shaftoe reporting for duty, sir!" "And who the hell might you be, Bobby Shaftoe?" says this general, hardly batting an eye. This guy actually has a German accent! "I've killed more Nips than seismic activity…I know Manila like the back of my hand. My wife and child are there. And I'm kinda at loose ends. Sir!" In London, in D.C., he'd never have gotten this close, and if he had, he'd have been shot or arrested. But this is SOWESPAC, and so the next morning he's on a B-17 bound for Hollandia, wearing Army green, no rank."

"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."

""Oh, the gravy boat!" Randy’s mom exclaims, and hoists up something that is more of a heavy cruiser than a boat…He pretends to admire it from the side, and then flips it over to read the words glazed on the bottom. ROYAL ALBERT LAVENDER ROSE."

"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."

"M.A. is a pretty straightforward by the book type, the kind who'll get good grades and fit well into any kind of hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card. He has the makings of either a total loser or a successful entrepreneur. Randy has spilled a hell of a lot of information to Robin, in just a couple of days, about digital currency and the new global economy. Randy's mental state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at a time. Robin has hoovered it all up.""

"The General continues, as if he were reading this from a script. "And now, when I least expect it, I encounter you, here, many leagues distant from your assigned post, out of uniform, in a disheveled condition, accompanied by a Nipponese officer, violating the sanctity of a ladies' powder room! Shaftoe, have you no sense whatsoever of military honor? Do you not respect decorum?""

"There is something backwards about climbing up six flights of stairs in order to get to a dungeon."

"Power of water, wind and earth, Turn the fire back to its birth. Raise the spell to shield the flame By the power that we have tamed."

"By the darkness of the stone’s heart, By the silence of the sea’s tears, By the whisper of the sky’s breath, By the dawning of the star’s flame, Do as I will thee!"