The System Of The World (The Baroque Cycle, #3)

by Neal Stephenson

Starting friendships, like opening up new overseas trade routes, was a mad venture best left to the young.

’Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstanchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal.

Ladies run Europe.

Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he’d plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone.

The Tower’s inmates refrain from escaping, not because the place is so competently looked after, but because they are mostly English gentlemen, who would look on it as bad form to leave.

“We are such old friends that we refuse to speak to each other for decades at a time.

There were scattered outbreaks of courtesy.

“Sometimes I phant’sy I am speaking to a medieval relic, when I talk to a Tory,”

“I shall see you, Daniel, on Parnassus, or wherever it is that Philosophers end up!” “I think they end up in old books,” said Daniel, “and so I shall look for you, sir, in a Library.”

“Because this is England and we don’t massacre people in England!” Marlborough announces. “Or rather, we do but we are striving to turn over a new leaf.