William Gibson

Quotes

1. Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature’s way of telling you you had too much money to begin with.

2. 

   "What did you do to that guy?"

   "I completed the movement he began when he struck you…His unusual center of gravity made it possible to sever the spinal cord without contacting the vertebrae themselves." This in a tone that someone might use to describe the discovery of a new but convenient bus route.

3. 

   The knife's plain haft, against his ribs, through a starched evening shirt.

   The handles of a craftman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand.

   That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

4. 

   They were there, seated in strange, Chinese-looking chairs that hadn't been there before.

   One of them was a thin, pale man in a dark suit from no particular era…The other presented an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter…

   "Mr. Rydell," said the one with the hat, "thank you for coming. You may call me Klaus. This is the Rooster."

   "Listen to me, Rydell," the Rooster said. "You are now responsible for something of the utmost importance, the greatest possible value. Where is it?"

   "I don't know who you are. I'm not telling you anything."

   Klaus coughed dryly. "The only proper answer."

   "In your situation," said the Rooster, "you might be advised to listen to anyone who cares to address you."

   "We are here to assure you, Mr. Rydell, that the resources of the Walled City will be at your disposal in the coming crisis."

5. 

   The past is past, the future unformed.

   There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

6. 

   Rydell watched this man move ahead, in front of him, and felt something complicated. He'd always dreamed of a special kind of grace…what he was seeing now, what he was following: this guy who was maybe fifty, and who moved in a way that kept him in every bit of available shadow…and Rydell followed, in his pain and the clumsiness that induced, but also in the pain of his adolescent heart, the boy in him having wanted all these years to be something like this man, whoever and whatever he was.

7. 

   If Laney had anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces.

   She was nothing like that…And now her eyes met his.

   He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows…Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.

8. 

   They’d been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way…They were from Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts…Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He’d overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television.

9. 

   “Walled City is of the net, but not on it," Masahiko said. "There are no laws here, only agreements.”

   “You can’t be on the net and not be on the net,” Chia said.

   “Distributed processing,” he said. “Interstitial. It began with a shared killfile.”

10. 

    Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, no, an Antarctica, of information. Looking at her face would trigger it again: she was some unthinkable volume of information. She induced the nodal vision in some unprecedented way; she induced it as narrative.

11. 

    Rydell looked around. That ol’ Rapture was big at Nightmare Folk Art, he decided. Those kind of Christians, his father had always maintained, were just pathetic. There the Millennium had up, come, and gone, no Rapture to speak of, and here they were, still beating that same drum.

12. 

    Gomi Boy’s cigarette looked like it had been made in a factory: a perfect white tube with a brown tip he put to his lips. Chia had seen those in old movies; sometimes, the ones they hadn’t gone through yet to digitally erase them.