Neal Stephenson Books

"It turned out that if you did the mathematicks on a typical war, the cost of powder was more important than just about anything else — Herr Geidel insisted that the gunpowder in the arsenal of Venice, for example, was worth more than the annual revenue of the entire city. This explained a lot of oddness Jack had witnessed in various campaigns and forced him to reconsider (briefly) his opinion that all officers were mad."

"If we have a duty to be alert for the signs of the End Times, then let me go, Father. For if the signs are comets, then the first to know will be the astronomers. If the signs are plague, the first to know—" "—will be physicians. Yes, I understand. But are you suggesting that those who study natural philosophy can acquire some kind of occult knowledge—special insight into God's Creation, not available to the common Bible-reading man?" "Er ... I suppose that's quite clearly what I'm suggesting." Drake nodded. "That is what I thought. Well, God gave us brains for a reason—not to use those brains would be a sin."

"It is not skepticism for its own sake, Father. Simply an awareness that we are prone to error, and that it is difficult to view anything impartially." "That is fine when you are talking about comets." "I'll not discuss religion, then. Good-bye, Father." "God be with you, Daniel."

"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--that men had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since."

"Daniel Waterhouse does not own slaves.... So little Godfrey sits on the lap, not of some Angolan negress, but of their neighbor: the daft but harmless Mrs. Goose, who comes into their home occasionally to do the one thing that she apparently can do: to entertain children by spouting all manner of nonsensical stories and doggerel that she has collected or invented.... Many words are said, but they make no more impact on Daniel than Mrs. Goose's incoherent narratives about cutlery leaping over cœlestial bodies and sluttish hags living in discarded footwear."

"... but he knows that this ungainly moment will be edited from The Story that will one day live in the memories of the American Waterhouses. The Story is in excellent hands. Mrs. Goose has come along to watch and memorize, and she has a creepy knack for that kind of thing...."

"My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone," Daniel finally says. "To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse. He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666—Number of the Beast and all that... When I came of age, I would be a man of the cloth, with the full university education, well versed in many dead classical languages, so that I could stand on the Cliffs of Dover and personally welcome Jesus Christ back to England in fluent Aramaic."

"It is a symbol of Mercury--patron of commerce--who has been worshipped in this cellar--and in this city--for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adapts itself to any container."

"Enoch had made himself something of an expert on longevity...had tried to develop the knack of edging around people's perceptions like one of those dreams that does not set itself firmly in memory, and is flushed into oblivion by the first thoughts and sensations of the day."

""But Enoch knew that the alchemists of Europe were men just like Clarke--hoping, and dreading, that Enoch would return with the news that some English savant, working in isolation, had found the trick of refining, for the base, dark, cold, essential foecal matter of which the world was made, the Philosophick Mercury--the pure living essense of God's power and presence in the world--the key to the transmutation of metals, the attainment of immortal life and perfect wisdom."

"The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one's own ability to turn lead into gold."

"Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the eternal by way of the mundane."

"We are not letting the Pretender in! You were there at his so-called birth —you saw the sleight-of-hand involving the warming-pan— surely a man of your discrimination was not so easily deceived!" "To me it looked like a babe's head coming out of the Queen's vagina." "And you call yourself a man of science!" "Roger, if you would set aside this quaint notion that countries must be ruled by kings who are the sons of other kings, then it would not matter whether the Pretender entered St. James's Palace through a vagina, or a warming-pan; either way, to hell with him." "Are you suggesting I become a Republican?" "I'm suggesting you already are one."

"That God hears the prayers of Lutherans, is a proposition hotly disputed by many, including many Lutherans. Indeed the late fortunes of the King of Sweden in his wars against the Tsar might lend support to those who say, that the surest way to bring something about, is for Lutherans to get down on their knees and pray that God forbid it."

"Wren bore his eighty-one years as an arch supports tons of stone. He had been a sort of mathematical and mechanical prodigy. The quicksilver that had seemingly welled up out of the ground, round the time of Cromwell, had been especially concentrated in him. Later that tide had seemed to ebb, as many of the early Royal Society men had succumbed to a heaviness of the limbs, or of the spirit. Not so with Wren, who seemed to be changing from an elfin youth into an angel, with only a brief sojourn in Manhood."

"“I’ll not take anyone’s money—yours, your banker’s, or your backer’s, sir. And I’ll not ask who your backer is, for it has gradually become obvious to me that your errand is—like a bat—dark, furtive, and delicate.""

"Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?"

"Are you a wagering man, Dr. Waterhouse?" "I was brought up to loathe it. But my return to London is proof that I am a fallen man."

""There is a way to fool the weighing-test", Isaac said. "Impossible! Nothing is heavier than gold!" "I have discovered the existence of gold of greater than twenty-four-carat weight." "That is an absurdity", Daniel said, after a moment's pause to consider it. "Your mind, being a logical organ, rejects it", Isaac said, "because, by definition, pure gold weighs twenty-four carats. Pure gold cannot become purer, hence, cannot be heavier. Of course, I am aware of this. But I say to you that I have with my own hands weighed gold that was heavier than gold that I knew to be pure". From any other man on earth --Natural Philosophers included-- this would amount to saying "I was sloppy in the laboratory and got it wrong". From Sir Isaac Newton, it was truth of Euclidean clarity."

"Winged-footed Mercury, messenger of the Gods, must have very little to do nowadays, as everyone in Europe seemed to be worshipping Jesus. If he could somehow be tracked down and put on retainer and put to work flitting back and forth from city to country and back, carrying information about who owed what to whom, and if one, furthermore, had rooms full of toiling Computers, or (engaging in a bit of Speculative Fiction here) a giant Arithmetickal Engine for balancing the accounts, then most transactions could be settled by moving a quill across a page, and movement of silver across England could be cut back to the minimum needed to settle the balance between city and country."

"I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent."

"But when they had got through the obligatory stuff in the beginning of the service, and the Minister finally had an opportunity to stand up and share what was on his mind, it turned out that all of this fasting, humiliation, and wearing of rough garments was to bewail an event that Daniel had personally witnessed, from a convenient perch on his father’s shoulders, sixty-five years earlier."

"So you see, Ben, journeying via Paris might have been roundabout, but it was infinitely safer. Besides, people in Paris had been pestering me, too, and they had more money than Mr. Clarke. So Mr. Clarke had to get in line, as they say in New York."

"Among fine stone sea-merchants' houses, there is a brick-red door with a bunch of grapes dangling above it. Enoch goes through that door and finds himself in a good tavern. Men with swords and expensive clothes turn round to look at him. Slavers, merchants of rum and molasses and tea and tobacco, and captains of the ships that carry those things. It could be any place in the world, for the same tavern is in London, Cadiz, Smyrna, and Manila, and the same men are in it. None of them cares, supposing they even knew, that witches are being hanged five minutes' walk away."

"Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was."

"“And so to make such a bother about one chap seems as bizarre, idolatrous, fetishistic, and beside the point to me, as Hindoos venerating Cows.” ”He lived in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Threader, meaning Windsor. ”A local connexion that was not even mentioned in the homily—not, I say, in the first, the second, or the third hour of it. Rather, I heard much talk that sounded to me like politics.” ”To you. Yes. But to me, Dr. Waterhouse, it sounded like church. Whereas, if we were to go there—" and Mr. Threader pointed at a barn in a field to the north side of Tyburn Road, surrounded by carriages, and emanating four-part harmony; i.e., a Meeting-House of some Gathered Church “—we would hear much that would sound like church to you, and politics to me.”"

"“Dr. Waterhouse assures us that piss-boiling on a very large scale is needed to make phosphorus for these Infernal Devices,” Mr. Orney reminded them. “His account left little to the imagination,” Mr. Threader said."

"“The Druids loved to set great stones on end,” commented the Earl. “For what purpose, I cannot imagine.” "You have answered the question by asking it.”"

"The kings of France and of the Vagabonds were alone together; the former had made a great show of dismissing his glorious courtiers, who had made a great show of being astonished…. ”You know,” said Jack, “I was a King for a while in Hindoostan, and my subjects would get worked up into a lather about a potato, which to them was worth as much as a treasure chest. At first I’d want to know everything about the potato in question, and I would take a large stake in the matter, but towards the end of my reign—“ Here Jack rolled his eyes, as Frenchmen frequently did during encounters with Englishmen. LeRoy seemed to take his meaning very clearly. “It is the same with every King.”"

"Daniel declined the tobacco with a wave of his hand. "One day that Indian weed will kill more white men, than white men have killed Indians.""

"“Daemonic necromancy is so tedious, and fraught with unintended consequences,” said Oyonnax, “when syrup of poppies does the job perfectly well.""

"“I do hope you'll reconsider, now, all of the unpleasant things you have had to say in the past about Satan.” This was how Anne-Marie de Crépy, duchesse d’Oyonnax, greeted her cousin when his eyelids — which had been closed, three days ago, by a Jesuit father in Versailles — twitched open."

"“But, cousine, I had always believed that you had only affected an interest in the Black Arts, when it was fashionable. That you considered it all perfect nonsense.” “You have been furious at me, Édouard, for deeming it all nonsense! For to call Satan a figment of man’s phant’sy is but one step from saying the same of God, is it not?” “Indeed, cousine, I should rather you were a sincere Satanist than a pretend one; for the former recognizes God’s majesty, and may be reformed, while the latter is an atheist, and doomed to the Lake of Fire.”"

"“But those blows do not hurt me, because I am followed around—some would say, haunted—by a long train of angels and miracles that account for my having survived to such a great age. I think that this explains why I was chosen for this work: either I am living a charmed life, or else I have overstayed my welcome on this Planet; either way, my destiny’s in London.”"

""Most come to terms with Death sooner or later. My failure to do so was an unintended consequence of a pact that my family had made with Enoch Root. In order for him to dwell among humankind he must don identities, and later, before his longevity draws notice, shed them. My father knew about Enoch — knew a little of what he was…I was in some sense the quickest, for I came to know that Enoch was not like us. And I guessed that this was a matter of his having discovered some Alchemical receipt that conferred life eternal. A reasonable guess — but wrong. At any rate, it fired my interest in Alchemy until of late.”"

"“I had got the news that the Elector and his whore had died,” said Lothar mildly, in French, “and wondered if a visit from the Reaper might not be in store for me as well.”"

"Tactics, are what the Duchess of Arcachon has been pursuing; Baron von Hacklheber has quite neglected tactics for strategy." "Who won?" "Neither, for neither pure tactics nor pure strategy constitutes a wise course for a Prince, or a Princess."

"If it eases your mind, know that the confusion of which you speak is the death-throes of an old system. The English, being a small and disorderly country, understood this a few years earlier than the French…The tide of quicksilver that rose up in that country around the time of Plague and Fire produced a generation of more than normally acute minds."

"Why Baroque? Because it is set in the Baroque, and it IS baroque. Why Cycle? Because I am trying to avoid the T-word ("trilogy"). In my mind this work is something like 7 or 8 connected novels. These have been lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint, but they could just as well have been put all together in a single immense volume or separated into 7 or 8 separate volumes. So to slap the word "trilogy" on it would be to saddle it with a designation that is essentially bogus. Having said that, I know everyone's going to call it a trilogy anyway."

"“Pay attention, that’s all,” Eliza said. “Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain.”"

"Confusion is a kind of bewitchment — a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature."

"To him, it was monstrously strange that an aged Natural Philosopher should materialize all of a sudden in the middle of Dartmoor, in a coonskin wrapper, and croak out a few words that would cause every gentleman in a twenty-mile radius to liquidate other holdings, and buy stock in that commercial Lunatick Asylum, the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire."

"“This is the world you have made,” Mr. White had said to Daniel — blaming him somehow for the Glorious Revolution. But Daniel saw it rather differently. This was the world Drake had made, a world where power came of thrift and cleverness and industry, not of birthright, and certainly not of Divine Right. This was the Whig World, and though Drake would have abhorred everything about most of these people, he would have had to admit that he had in a way caused this Juncto."

"Sir Richard Apthorp's Country dwelling was situated about midway between Cambridge and Oxford.... The nearest town of any size was called Bletchley, and Daniel had to stop to ask for directions there, because Sir Richard had in no way made his house an obvious one. This bland countryside seemed oddly well suited for the hiding of secrets in plain sight."

""Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that You shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to Your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. "Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun’s radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobby stones hidden in our coat-pockets remind us that we are all earth, and that we are sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr. Waterhouse?” “Only, Amen!” “Amen. Damn me, I am late for my next conspiracy! Godspeed, Daniel.”"

"What does it say of us that our commerce is built 'pon forms and figments while that of Spain is built 'pon silver?" "Some would say it speaks to our advancement."

"Few men were big, strong, and reckless enough to pick up Brigitte and toss her, when she was not of a mind to be. This fellow had been, prior to the loss of his arm. As matters stood, they were evenly matched, unless he elected to beat her senseless with the terrible flail first. Eliza thought she could see a tenderness about his eyes. And so a dire, ungainly, loud struggle, destructive of property and of the dignity of the participants, ranged all across the cabin."

"Roger got a glazed-over look, as he always did when abstract theological matters were dragged into the conversation. Unlike ordinary men, who required several minutes to become fully glazed over, Roger could do it in an instant, as if a window-sash had dropped in front of him from a great height."

"You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does."

"I pray that the question you sent to Dr. Waterhouse has been addressed, to your satisfaction, by the foregoing. If I have failed to satisfy, or (may God forbid it) given offense, I beg you to write back telling me as much, so that I may bend every effort to make it good. For it is my very great honour and pleasure to be your humble and obedient servant. - RAVENSCAR P.S. If your intention is to mint French silver into English coin to pay the French and Irish troops that have been preparing to invade England from around Cherbourg in the third week of May, then I congratulate you on your ingenuity. Delivery of the coins from Mint to Front shall pose a not inconsiderable logistical challenge, and so I make you the following offer: If Admiral Tourville’s invasion-fleet makes it across the Channel without being sunk by the Royal Navy, and if the Papist legion establishes a beachhead on English soil without being destroyed by the Army or torn to bits by an enraged Mobb of English rurals, then I shall personally carry every single one of your coins from the Tower of London to the front in my arse-hole, and Deposit them in some Place where they may be easily Picked Up."