The Baroque Cycle Quotes

“But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Daniel saw in a way he’d never seen anything before: his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was real, that the stars actually looked like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“These simple terms—“come about,” for example—denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say ’tis the other way round.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“If you make certain assumptions about the force of gravity, and how the weight of an object diminishes as it gets farther away, it’s not improbable at all,” Isaac said. “It just happens. You would keep going round and round forever.” “In a circle?” “An ellipse.” “An ellipse…” and here the bomb finally went off in his head, and Daniel had to sit down on the ground, the moisture of last year’s fallen apples soaking through his breeches. “Like a planet.” “Just so—if only we could jump fast enough, or had a strong enough wind at our backs, we could all be planets.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it—which must have been a great spiritual struggle—and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Gomer Bolstrood”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he’d purged all the people he did consider dangerous. With a few exceptions such as Isaac Barrow, none of them would have had any use for Isaac’s sundial, because it didn’t look like an old sundial, and they’d prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way. The curves that Newton plotted on the wall were a methodical document of their wrongness—a manifesto like Luther’s theses on the church-door.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, “What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible—you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“What is the moral of your play, Jack?” “Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they’ve got Bibles, too.” “Sound advice.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Thinking is what angels do—it is a property given to Man by God.” “How do you suppose God gives it to us?” “I do not pretend to know, sir!” “If you take a man’s brain and distill him, can you extract a mysterious essence—the divine presence of God on Earth?” “That is called the Philosophick Mercury by Alchemists.” “Or, if Hooke were to peer into a man’s brain with a good enough microscope, would he see tiny meshings of gears?” Daniel said nothing. Leibniz had imploded his skull. The gears were jammed, the Philosophick Mercury dribbling out his ear-holes.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“The Bourbon-Orléans family tree is infinitely larger, more ramified, and more intertangled than can possibly be shown here, largely owing to the longevity, fertility, and polygamy of Louis XIV.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“God has chosen the world that is the most perfect, that is to say, the one that is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“He wanted her for what lay at either end of her spinal column - it was not clear witch end he favored - and not for her spiritual qualities.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Having nothing else to do, he sat down to die, and fell asleep instead, and had nightmares that were an improvement on reality.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Since God had predestined all events anyway, there was no way for them to avoid the Plague, if that was their doom—and if it wasn’t, why, no harm in staying there on the edge of the city and setting an example for the fleeing and/or dying populace.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Heavenly radiance fills the æther, its rays parallel and straight and, so long as nothing is there to interrupt them, invisible. The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand, or even hear—the direction from which they shine, the spectrum of colors concealed within the light, these are all characters in a cryptogram. The gnomon—look at our shadows on the Green! We are the gnomon. We interrupt that light and we are warmed and illuminated by it. By stopping the light, we destroy part of the message without understanding it. We cast a shadow, a hole in the light, a ray of darkness that is shaped like ourselves—some might say that it contains no information save the profile of our own forms—but they are wrong. By recording the stretching and skewing of our shadows, we can attain part of the knowledge hidden in the cryptogram. All we need to make the necessary observations is a fixed regular surface—a plane—against which to cast the shadow. Descartes gave us the plane.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“So, drawing a mental line from the dead criminals at the city gate, to the powder-house on the Common, to the witch-gallows, and finally to the harbor defenses, he has got one Cartesian number-line—what Leibniz would call the Ordinate—plotted out: he understands what people are afraid of in Boston, and how the churchmen and the generals keep the place in hand. But it remains to be seen what can be plotted in the space above and below. The hills of Boston are skirted by endless flat marshes that fade, slow as twilight, into Harbor or River, providing blank empty planes on which men with ropes and rulers can construct whatever strange curves they phant’sy.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined,” d’Avaux corrected her. “If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“This might sound like a foolish thing to have done, but a woman who has no family and few friends is forever skirting the edges of a profound despair, which derives from the fear that she could vanish from the world and leave no trace she had ever existed; that the things she has done shall be of no account and the perceptions she has formed [as of Dr. von Pfung for example] shall be swallowed up like a cry in a dark woods.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Paganism? Then we are all pagans! 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 adopts the shape of any container—”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“and large outdoor furnaces where the ore was refined, and mounds of earth in long rows where quicksilver was being used to extract silver from lower-grade ore. To Jack it was a toss”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“He was of an age where it was never possible to pursue one errand at a time. He must do many at once. He guessed that people who had lived right and arranged things properly must have it all rigged so that all of their quests ran in parallel, and reinforced and supported one another just so. They gained reputations as conjurors. Others found their errands running at cross purposes and were never able to do anything; they ended up seeming mad, or else perceived the futility of what they were doing and gave up, or turned to drink.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Now, if you—the ingenious Dr. Leibniz—contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking—is it really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?” “You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God’s genius?”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“You need to tend to your own faults, young fellow—excessive sobriety, e.g…” “A tendency to fret—” Pepys put in. “Undue chastity—let’s back to the tavern!”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“I have given up hope, tonight, of ever understanding money.” “It’s simple, really…” “And yet it’s not simple at all,” Daniel said. “It follows simple rules—it obeys logic—and so Natural Philosophy should understand it, encompass it—and I, who know and understand more than almost anyone in the Royal Society, should comprehend it. But I don’t. I never will…if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules…”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“Princes were taught a thing or two about being rational, as they were taught to play a little lute and dance a passable ricercar. But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World

“That’s how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long—they simply say it in Latin. But if we were to unfold their convoluted phrases and translate them into a philosophical language, all of their contradictions and vagueness would become manifest.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World