The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)

Of these, the two very finest were the Book of the Book and the Book of the Seed.

the smooth muscles of the tract in question executing their spinal algorithm.

the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk.

It is remarkable, love,” he said, looking at Nell for the first time, “how much money you can make shovelling back the tide. In the end you need to get out while the getting is good. Not very honourable, I suppose, but then, there is no honour among consultants.”

Nell would have been dazzled by Colonel Napier if she had not recently seen him strapped to a rack. Still, there was something about this very contradiction that made him, and by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to her. They lived a life of nearly perfect emotional denial—a form of asceticism as extreme as that of a medieval stylite. Yet th

Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearl

But Nell's eyes had an appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who met her.

glorious ironwork chandeliers,

she suspected that she could see a beautiful sunset from the room in the high tower where she had established her library. It was a long climb up a dank and mildewy staircase that wound up the inside of the Dark Castle's highest tower.