"“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.”"

"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."

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

"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."

"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 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...."

""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."

"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."

"Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?"

"He 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."

"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."

"One of those moments had arrived: Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being shrewd would've been. These moments seemed to come to Jack every few days. They almost never came to Bob…. Jack had been expecting such a moment to arrive today. He'd supposed, until moments ago, that it had already come: namely, when he decided to mount the horse and ride after the ostrich. But here was a rare opportunity for stupidity even more flagrant and glorious. … Bob was convinced that the Imp of the Perverse rode invisibly on Jack's shoulder whispering bad ideas into his ear, and that the only counterbalance was Bob himself… But Bob was in England."

"Particular mention must go to Fernand Braudel, to whose work this book may be considered a discursive footnote. … Of particular note is Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s six-volume biography of Marlborough, which people who are really interested in this period of history should read, and people who think that I am too long-winded should weigh."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The most important occupants of country estates were not men, but sheep, and the most important activity was conversion of grass into wool; for wool, exported, brought revenue, and revenue, farmed, enable gentle fold to pay rent, buy wine, and gamble in London, all winter long."

"One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives."

"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

"The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money."

"Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time."

"Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething."

"There is this trouble about special providences-namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children."

"Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent."

"Tell the truth or trump — but get the trick."

"I wish I owned half of that dog." "Why?" somebody asked. "Because I would kill my half." The group searched his face with curiosity, with anxiety even, but found no light there, no expression that they could read. They fell away from him as from something uncanny, and went into privacy to discuss him. One said: "'Pears to be a fool." "'Pears?" said another. "Is, I reckon you better say." "Said he wished he owned half of the dog, the idiot," said a third. "What did he reckon would become of the other half if he killed his half? Do you reckon he thought it would live?"

"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."

"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."

"It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races."

"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."

"Thanksgiving Day. Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji."

"July 4 Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so."

"Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo dies; but by and by, you only regret that you didn't see him do it."

"Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by."

"Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman: if you have witness, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth."

"It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained there were too many prehistoric toads in it."

"Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET"."

"Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of paradise."

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."

"Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits."

"October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February."

"Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world."

"All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" — a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live."

"The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world's luxuries, king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented."

"We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster."

"Remark of Dr. Baldwin's, concerning upstarts: We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles."

"He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages."

"When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life."