Pat Cadigan

Fez gave her a squeeze. “You’re a genius, Sam-I-Am.”

She squirmed away from him uncomfortably. “It just makes sense, is all.”

“Sometimes that’s all it takes to be a genius.”

Ninety percent of life was being there, and the rest was being there on time.

Nothing stays the same, Gina, nothing works forever. If I don’t like it, that’s too bad. If you don’t like it, that’s still too bad.

The Beater has still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don’t slow down, we’re gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn’t happened that way. So they’d all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old—hell, not even growing up.

Meditation was such a loose term; you can do almost anything mentally and call it meditation.

Keep your best whiskey in a bottle marked ‘mouthwash.’

Old responses live long, die hard, and frequently leave a troublesome corpse.

Everybody wants to be somebody but nobody wants to be just anybody.

Help him by helping him resist your help.

“‘Truth is cheap, but information costs.’ I can’t remember who said that.”

“Vince What’s-His-Name,” said Sam. “Died in a terrorist raid or something. I thought you said all information should be free.”

“It should. It isn’t. Knowledge is power. But power corrupts. Which means the Age of Fast Information is an extremely corrupt age in which to live.”

“Aren’t they all?” Sam asked him.

It gets tricky here, but it’s always seemed to be that sanity is, or can be, as relative as anything else. Sacrifice an animal to Zeus and predict the future from the formation of its entrails—do that as a general in ancient Greece hoping for victory in a coming battle and you’re prudent. Do it today and you’re a clinical paranoid and a mean one, too. Sanity, like customs and manners, seems to have a strong basis in the accepted standards of a particular time and place.

“Truth and information are not the same thing. I promise you that’s a fact.”

“So you told yourself. But you have to admit that they do coincide often enough to let us all get around in the world safely.”