The Diamond Age Quotes

“She had found that her wits became dull if she got too cozy.”

“"In an era when everything can be surveiled, all we have left is politeness."”

“They only have one book in Sendero, and it tells them to burn all the other books.”

“It was a bit too aggressive to be a reverie and too abstract to be a hallucination.”

“He had been born without the ability to blend and socialize as some are born without hands.”

“Wikipedia: The Diamond Age”

“If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.”

“So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.”

“New Chusan rose above them, a short swim away, and up on the mountain they could hear the bells of the cathedral ringing.”

“We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations.”

““Have you done anything the Shanghai Police might find interesting?” Brad asked Harv gravely. Harv said no, a simple no without the usual technicalities, provisos, and subclauses.”

““It’s the only punishment that seems to sink in—we employ it with some frequency.”
“Then perhaps it is not sinking in as well as you suppose,” Lord Finkle-McGraw said, looking sad and sounding bemused.”

“There are only two industries. This has always been true....There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment....After people have everything they need to live, everything else is entertainment. Everything.”

“But as many first-time fathers had realized in the delivery room, there was something about the sight of an actual baby that focused the mind. In a world of abstractions, nothing was more concrete than a baby.”

“The bells of St. Mark's were ringing changes up on the mountain when Bud skated over to the mod parlor to upgrade his skull gun.”

“Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.”

“If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different—it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society, as the Master stated many times.”

“During her first few weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years.”

“What does it really mean when such a young person moves to another phyle? It means that they have outgrown youthful credulity and no longer wish to belong to a tribe simply because it is the path of least resistance—they have developed principle, they are concerned with their personal integrity.”

“He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one’s life accordingly.”