William Gibson

Quotes

1. The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport become a destination…He has glimpsed the edges of a life there that he feels is somehow ancient and eternal. Apparent disorder arranged in some deeper, some unthinkable fashion.

2. 

   "It's all going to change, Yamazaki."

   "I don't understand."

   "Know what the joke is? It didn't change when they thought it would. Millennium was a Christian holiday. I've been looking at history, Yamazaki. I can see the nodal points in history. Last time we had one like this was 1911."

   "What happened in 1911?"

   "Everything changed."

3. 

   “[Harwood] is the richest man in the world and ahead of the curve. He’s an agent of change, and massively invested in the status quo. He embodies paradoxical propositions. Too hip to live, too rich to die. Get it?”

   “No.”

   “We think he’s like us, basically,” Klaus says. “He’s trying to hack reality, but he’s going strictly big casino, and he’ll take the rest of the species with him.”

4. 

   Fontaine knows the bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridge's host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing.

5. 

   The Tao, he reminds himself, is older than God.

6. 

   There were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood…everybody had something they “really” did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she’d had massages from a girl who was really a stunt double for some actress Chevette had never heard of…

   Somebody had everybody’s number, but it looked like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that.

7. 

   Whenever they went to bed, it had seemed more like making history than love.

8. 

   Everything to Fontaine, had a story. Each object, each fragment comprising the built world. A chorus of voices, the past alive in everything, that sea upon which the present tossed and rode. When he’d built Skinner’s funicular, the elevator that crawled like a small cable car up the angled iron of the tower, Fontaine had a story about the derivation of each piece. He wove their stories together, applied electricity: the thing rose, clicking, to the hatch in the floor of Skinner’s room.

9. 

   "And I'm safer with you than I am with these guys you say are mercs?"

   "I think so, yes," the man said, frowning, as though he took the question very seriously.

   "You kill anybody else in the past forty-eight hours?

   "No, I did not."

   "Well," Rydell said, "I guess I'm with you. I'm sure not going to try to fight you."

   "That is wise," the man said.

10. 

    "It's what we do now instead of bohemias," Harwood says.

    "Instead of what?"

    "Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies…And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct."

    "Extinct?"

    "We started picking them before they could ripen…as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters."

11. 

    Someday he'll have his shit together right. He'll live in a house, and it will be clean as Lucky Dragon. All lit up like that, and he'll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches. Watch everybody's ass and nobody fuck with him.

12. 

    Rydell had a theory about virtual real estate. The smaller and cheaper the physical site of a given operation, the bigger and cheesier the website.