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Quicksilver

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Quicksilver

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Highlights

  • The savants of Leipzig, Paris, and Amsterdam had begun to think of it as a rock in the high Atlantic, overrun by heavily armed preachers. (Location 438)
  • Enoch was less a merchant than a messenger. The sulfur and antimony he brought as favors. He accepted money in order to pay for his expenses. The important cargo was in his mind. He and Clarke talked for hours. (Location 473)
  • “No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,” Dr. Waterhouse reminds him. “But if each one is assigned a unique number—prime numbers for monads, and products of primes for composites—then organizing them is simply a matter of performing computations . . . Mr. Root.” (Location 648)
  • As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he’s startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. (Location 859)

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title: Quicksilver longtitle: Quicksilver author: Neal Stephenson url: , source: kindle last_highlight: 2010-09-12 type: books tags:

Quicksilver

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • The savants of Leipzig, Paris, and Amsterdam had begun to think of it as a rock in the high Atlantic, overrun by heavily armed preachers. (Location 438)
  • Enoch was less a merchant than a messenger. The sulfur and antimony he brought as favors. He accepted money in order to pay for his expenses. The important cargo was in his mind. He and Clarke talked for hours. (Location 473)
  • “No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,” Dr. Waterhouse reminds him. “But if each one is assigned a unique number—prime numbers for monads, and products of primes for composites—then organizing them is simply a matter of performing computations . . . Mr. Root.” (Location 648)
  • As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he’s startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. (Location 859)