Frank > Frank's Quotes

“If I had a copper for every fly that swarms on you, beast, I’d buy the Spanish Empire! You smell worse than Vera Cruz in the springtime, and there is more filth clinging to your body than most animals shit in a year. Truly you must have sprung fully formed from a heap of manure, as flies and Popes do—may God have mercy on my soul for saying that!”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin’ me in front of the lads! You can’t play by their rules or they’ll win unfailingly! You don’t engage in courtly play-fightin’ with one such as this. You get a great friggin’ tree-branch and keep hittin’ him with it until he dies. Like that. D’you see, boys?”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“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.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness. —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“I don’t hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn’t there to make Englishmen of you, and so it’s Irish you are, by default.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like “complicated.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“I write: All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters Remix

“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, single-malt whiskey, smoked beef lymph nodes, autumn leaves, red fuming nitric acid, bituminous coal, fallout, printer's ink, laundry starch, drain cleaner, blue chrysotile asbestos, carrageenan, BHA, BHT, and natural flavorings.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age