"Quicksilver"
“No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification
was making favourable impressions on some particular woman.”
"Cryptonomicon"
“Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite
complexity.”
p.8.
“He can see…the imposing superstructure of Mrs Pascual, contained within a mighty bodice
that looks like something dreamed up by naval engineers.”
- Bobby in Manila, p.55.
“This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learnt things but to relieve
the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing
research.”
p.97.
“Waterhouse did not know until now that his head was damaged, which stands to reason,
in that your head is where you know things, and if it’s damaged, how can you know it?”
p.389.
“At some point he switches to English - the same dialect of English spoken by flight
attendants for foreign airlines, who have told passengers to insert the metal tongue into the
buckle so many times that is rushes out in one phlegmy garble.”
p.389.
“Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier-mâché houses, must be energetically
maintained or they will dissolve.”
p.538.
“World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden
cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice.”
p.591.
“The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the tail where flight
attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their twenty-eight birthdays.”
p.891.
Skiing: “prostitution of the snow”
An Austrian historian quoted in National Geographic, February 2006, p109.
Julian Barnes
"Arthur and George"
“the centre of England - despite all God’s creature being equally blessed - is still a little
primitive, George.”
- Rev Edalji, p.42.
“How can you make sense of the beginning unless you know the ending?”
- Arthur, p.54.
“The notion that the dead body, an old, outworn greatcoat which once briefly wrapped the
soul, should be preserved at any cost was not just risible; it was the last word in
materialism.”
- concerning the Egyptians, p.72.
“it colonizes his face above and beyond the upper lip and extends in waxed toothpicks out
beyond the line of the earlobes.”
- Arthur’s moustache, p.162.
“Hard reading, with plenty of golf and cricket, will steady a man, keep him right in body
and mind.” p.172.
“ ‘As I say, I believe what my Church teaches,’ she replies. ‘I see no alternative. Apart from
atheism, which is mere emptiness and too depressing for words, and leads to socialism.’”
- Connie explains her beliefs concerning the afterlife, p.193.
“He is quite clear about the writer’s responsibilities: they are firstly, to be intelligible,
secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever. He knows his own abilities, and he also
knows that in the end, the reader is king.” p.198.
“But wanting the impossible canonizes the wanting. Now that the impossible has become
the possible, how much does he want?” p.204.
“And once reason - true reason - is left behind, the farther it is left behind the better, for
those who do the leaving. A man’s virtues are turned into his faults. Self-control presents
itself as secretiveness, intelligence as cunning.” p.234.
“The Mam brought Arthur up a Catholic, but both have since deserted the faith: the Mam
for Anglicanism, Arthur for Sunday golf.” p.257.
“If he has always valued her directness, there is a resident suspicion within him that
whenever a woman says something must be talked about, it is rarely something t a man’s
comfort or advantage.” p.258-9.
“Cannot people see that as the human brain evolves, it must take a wider outlook? A half-
formed brain makes a half-formed God, and who shall say our brain are even half-formed
yet?”
- Arthur to Jean, p.259.
“Why did people imagine that progress consisted of believing in less, rather than believing
in more, in opening yourself to more of the universe?” p.265.
“Abstention could be taken as proof either of moderation or extremity. It might be a sign of
a fellow able to control his human urges; or equally of someone who resisted vice in order to
concentrate his mind on other, more essential things - someone a touch inhuman, even
fanatical.” p.298.
“ ‘Well, it can be a puzzling condition, I warn you. Bliss, of course. But damned puzzling
bliss more often than not.”
- Arthur on marriage, p.299.
“ ‘Compromise! No, it’s a hypocrisy. It’s what this country does best. The bureaucrats and
the politicians have spent centuries perfecting it. It’s called a Government Report.”
- Arthur on the Gladstone Report, p.311.
“But noise, George thought, was not the best solution to everything. Heat did not always
produce light, and noise did not always produce locomotion.” p.313.
“but as a general rule he regarded the tendency of human being to agglomerate in one place
as the beginning of unreason.”
- George, p.328.
“This has happened, now let us forget about it and carry on as before: such was the English
way. Something was wrong, something was broken, but now it as been repaired, so let us
pretend that nothing much was wrong in the first place.” p.333.
“[George] is suspicious of joy. He has come across little of it in his life. In his childhood
there was something called pleasure, usually accompanied by the adjectives guilty, furtive or
illicit. The only pleasures allowed were those modified by the word simple.” p.344
“If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishmen who have passed over into
the next world, surely they would know how to form a queue?”
- George at Arthur’s funeral séance, p.348.
Niall Ferguson
"Colossus"
“Might the United States in fact be more like Samson, eyeless in Gaza, chased by
irreconcilable commitments in the Middle East and ultimately only of blind destruction?” p.3.
“and a distinctive form of ‘conversion’ usually called Americanisation, which is carved out
less by old-style Christian missionaries than by the exports of American consumer goods
and entertainment.” p.13.
“It prefers the idea that foreigners will Americanise themselves without the need for formal
rule.” p.13.
“a peculiarity of American imperialism - perhaps its principal shortcoming - is its excessively
short time horizon.” p.13.
“To those who would still insist on American ‘exceptionalism’, the historian of empires can
only retort: as exceptional as all the other sixty-nine empires.” p.15.
“the paradox of dictating democracy, enforcing freedom, of extorting emancipation.”
- America’s foreign policy paradox post-1913, p.54.
“I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa-constrictor might have to swallow
a porcupine wrong-end-to.”
- quoting Theodore Roosevelt on the Dominican Republic, p.56.
“What was planned did not happen. What happened was not planned. This was not so
much an empire by invitation as an empire by improvisation.”
- the post-war administration of Germany, p.73.
“For an empire in denial, there is really only one way to act imperially with a clear
conscience, and that is to combat someone else’s empire.” p.78
“bin Laden is the offspring of the Middle East’s distinctive civilisation of clashes, a retarded
political culture in which terrorism has long been a substitute for both peaceful politics and
conventional warfare.” p.120.
“Indeed, in 1999 a young American was almost as likely to be a victim of hostile fire if he
stayed in high school than if he joined the army.” p.140.
“ ‘Nation-building’ was a dirty word because it was associated with the UN. An American-
led ‘regime change’ was another matter.” p.150.
“Other empire-builders have fantasised about ruling subject peoples for a thousand years.
This would seem to be history’s first thousand-day empire. It is not so much ‘lite’ as
disposable.” p.204.
“There is in fact a great deal to be said for promising to leave - provided you do no actually
mean to do it.”
- Comparing American in Iraq with UK in Egypt, p.217.
John Howard
“It doesn’t matter who you are, you’ve got time for lunch.”
Time, March 6, 2006.
Tom Holland
"Persian Fire"
“ ‘Philobarbarus’ - ‘barbarian-lovers’ - one indignant patriot labelled him: the closest to the
phrase ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ that ancient Greek approached.”
- About Herodotus, p.XXIV.
“a people so toughened by poverty that they had uncomplainingly endured the sternest
hardships - even, notoriously, to the extent of wearing leather trousers.”
- the Persian subjects of Cyrus, p.10-11.
“the ruined cities of Assyria standing sentinel as he passed by, nothing now but dust-blown
and jumbled heaps of mud, mute witnesses to the precariousness of power.”
- Cyrus rides to meet Croesus, King of Lydia, p.13.
“Over the Lydian Empire itself, the news of Croesus’ downfall burst with such a
thunderclap that the priestess of one temple was said to have sprouted a beard from the
shock.” p.14.
“Even girls might get in on the act: the boys would routinely be ordered to strip before
them, to be subjected to either praise or mocking giggles - a true Spartan never had
anything to hide.” p.85.
“Deprive the Great King of his pudding, and morale might start to plummet. Not that it was
an easy matter to catch out a bureaucracy so attentive to detail that it was in the habit of
issuing travel chits to ducks.” p.287.
“Eat a good breakfast, for tonight we eat in the underworld.”
- Leonidas at Thermopylae, p.293.
“His fellow citizens had branded him ‘trembler’: the single most shameful word in the
Spartan lexicon.”
- Aristodemus, invalided from Thermopylae, p.341.
Yiyun Li
“there was also a surprising sameness and insularity to my students…To teach writing and
literature in America is, to me, to teach my students to be curious about people who are
different from them.”
- quoted in Time, April 24, 2006
W.F. Deedes
“We may have to wait a bit for the English spring; but when it comes, it never disappoints.
How wonderfully the primrose, the hedgerow flower and the bluebells in the wood convey
to us a sense of renewal, no matter how old we are.”
- Weekly Telegraph, no. 770.
David Cameron
“We believe in enterprise and innovation, we have faith in markets, and we understand that
Government doesn’t have all the answers – that we have a shared responsibility to bring
about positive change.”
- Weekly Telegraph, no.770.
Peter Ackroyd
"Shakespeare: The Biography"
“A neighbour was more than the man, woman or child who lived in the same street. A
neighbour was the one to whom you turned for support, in times of distress, and the one to
whom you offered help in return. A neighbour was expected to be thrifty, hard-working
and reliable.”
- p.33.
“If there is one aspect of a writer’s life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood. It arises
unbidden and unannounced in a hundred different contexts. It cannot be denied or
misrepresented without severe psychic disturbance on the surface of the writing. It is the
very source of the writing itself, and must necessarily remain undefiled.”
- p. 43.
“Has there ever been a great writer who did not spend a childhood in books?”
- p.44.
“Even as a small boy Shakespeare must have been aware of the disparity between his familial
religion and the orthodox pieties of the Stratford church; it was a difference of atmosphere
more than doctrine, perhaps, but when two faiths compete the alert child will learn the
power as well as the emptiness of words.”
- p.51.
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