Mona Lisa Overdrive

Quotes

1. Kumiko looked into Colin's transparent green eyes…"What are you?"

   "A Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base programmed to aid and advise the Japanese visitor in the United Kingdom." He winked at her.

   "Why did you wink?"

   The ghost touched his lips with a slim forefinger. "I'm something else as well, yes. I do display a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program. I can't tell you exactly what I am, though, because I don't know."

2. 

   Petal called the city Smoke.

3. 

   In cyberspace, Kumiko noted, there are no shadows.

4. 

   Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human.

5. 

   Child, know me.

   And Angie felt her there, all at once, and knew her for what she was, Mamman Brigitte, Mademoiselle Brigitte, eldest of the dead.

   I have no cult, child, no special altar. You are summoned to my reposoir. Hear me. Your father drew vévés in your head: he drew them in a flesh that was not flesh. You were consecrated to Ezili Freda. Legba led you into the world to serve his own ends. But you were sent poison, child, a coup-poudre.

6. 

   London was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care…Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.

7. 

   The ghost was her father's parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Narita. For the first two hours of the flight to London it lay forgotten in her purse…The ghost woke to Kumiko's touch as they began their descent into Heathrow…a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches and riding boots.

   "Hullo," the ghost said…"Name's Colin…Didn't get your name."

   "You aren't real," she said sternly.

   He shrugged.

8. 

   "You've got the wrong data in you, for what you're meant to be," Tick said.

   "To be perfectly honest," Colin said, with a toss of his forelock, "I've suspected as much."

   "Been iced over…You're supposed to know fucking everything about Shakespeare, aren't you?"

   "Sorry," Colin said, "but I'm afraid that I do know fucking everything about Shakespeare."

   "Give us a sonnet, then."

   Something like dismay crossed Colin's face. "You're right."

9. 

   He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.

10. 

    "The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about…'When It Changed'?"

    "The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a 'hidden people.' The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

11. 

    “You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.

    Sally looked down. “Yeah.”

    “Why don’t you have it removed?”

    “Sometimes it’s good to remember.”

    “Being hurt?”

    “Being stupid.”

12. 

    It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out of a nowhere sky. [Mona Lisa] had never been to an airport before, but she knew them from the stims.

13. 

    That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.

14. 

    Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?

15. 

    The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

16. 

    "I am no spy."

    "Then start being your own. If Tokyo's the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire."

17. 

    Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.

    It’s called money, Lanette said.

That’s all the quotes.

17 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more