William Gibson

Quotes

1. “You haven’t told me what I’m looking for.”

   “Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

2. 

   ”That Walled City, Zona, what is that?“

   “They say it began as a shared 'killfile.' It is an old expression. A way to avoid incoming messages. With the killfile in place, it was like those messages never existed. They never reached you. This was when the net was new, understand? Someone had the idea to turn the killfile inside out. This is not really how it happened, you understand, but this is how the story is told: that the people who founded Hak Nam were angry, because the net had been very free, you could do what you wanted, but then the governments and the companies, they had different ideas of what you could, what you couldn’t do. So these people, they found a way to unravel something. A little place, a piece, like cloth. They made something like a killfile of everything, everything they didn’t like, and they turned that inside out.”

3. 

   The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.

4. 

   “What kind of hotel did you say this is?” Chia got into the elevator.

   “Love hotel,” Masahiko said.

   “What’s that?” Going up.

   “Private rooms. For sex. Pay by the hour…but people who come here sometimes wish to port. There is a reposting service that makes it very hard to trace. Also for phoning, very secure.”

   Chia was looking at the round pink furry bed.

5. 

   “Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch TV, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”

6. 

   “You got eyes” she said, and yawned in the middle of it, “like two piss-holes in a snowbank.”

7. 

   When Rydell clicked into the Republic of Desire’s eyephone-space…he went from looking at the phone company’s logo to being right out there on that glassy plain…And then these figures were there, bigger than skyscrapers, bigger than anything, their chests about even with the edges of the plain.

   “Welcome to the Republic” said the dinosaur, its voice the voice of some beautiful woman.

   “You don’t have a third the bandwidth you need,” the dreadlocked mountain said, its voice about what you’d expect from a mountain. “You’re in K-tel space.”

8. 

   Yamazaki imagined the two spans of the deserted bridge in the downpour, the crowds accumulating. He watched as they climbed the wire fences, the barricades, in such numbers that the chain link twisted, fell. They had climbed the towers, then, more than thirty falling to their deaths. But when the dawn came, survivors clung there, news helicopters circling them in the gray light like patient dragonflies. He had seen this many times, watching the tapes in Osaka. But Skinner had been there.

9. 

   And then they were fading, breaking up into those paisley fractal things, and Rydell knew he was losing them.

   “Wait. Any of you live in San Francisco?”

   The dinosaur came flickering back. “What if we did?”

   “Well, do you like it?…Because it’s all going to change. They’re going to do it like they’re doing Tokyo.”

   “Tokyo? Who told you that?”

   Now the mountain was back, too. “There’s not a lot of slack, for us, in Tokyo, now…”

   “Tell us” the dinosaur said.

   So Rydell did.

10. 

    His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.

11. 

    Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect…these people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met.

12. 

    Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on.

    “It’s a virtual light display,” Freddie said, “Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.”

    “Telepresence,” Rydell said.

    “Naw,” Freddie said, “that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.”