William Gibson

Quotes

1. Ash's pallor blending perfectly with the wall, her eyes and chartreuse lips seemed to float there, a disembodied Cheshire goth, beneath her snaky black thundercloud of anti-coiffure.

2. 

   She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he’d sketched for her.

   None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity.

3. 

   Ask Lowbeer something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected…in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be.

4. 

   “Luke 4:5 still across the street?”

   “I think so, but Ossian’s exploring buying them out.”

   “Buying a church?”

   “You may already own several."

5. 

   “Lead the way then, Mr. Netherton,” said Lowbeer.

   Netherton did, imagining, as he climbed the stairs, a better world, one in which a relaxing drink would be waiting in the sitting room.

6. 

   Verity drew a bundle out with her glove-bagged hand, Franklin’s mild portrait bisected by a red elastic band. “This is wrong, this kind of money. You know that?”

   “Gives us agency.”

   “Agency?”

   “Capacity to act,” Eunice said.

   “Act how?”

   “Say we need to buy some shit.”

   “What shit?”

   “Kind that takes cash money.”

7. 

   In through a gate that reminded Flynne of a Baptist anime of hell she’d seen. Burton and Leon had thought the fallen women were hot.

   Into this thing’s shade, its coldness. Flagstone floors like paths in some very wrong garden. Dull lamps, like the eyes of big sick animals. It was like the intro segment for a Ciencia Loca episode, paranormal investigators, going someplace where a lot of people had suffered and died.

8. 

   “Good to see you, Wilf,” Janice said, from her black mesh workstation chair, his phone’s feed provided by her device’s camera…He’d forgotten about her having painted their living room Baker-Miller pink, an institutional shade once thought to reduce aggression in prisoners. Homeland Security had given the county drunk tank three more gallons than necessary, so she’d bartered a box of her preserves for them, at a community event.

9. 

   “I used to play in a game, because I needed the money…It was a hobby for them. Rich fucks. They bet on who’d win.” She was staring at Netherton.

   All his glibness, all his faithful machinery of convincing language, somehow spun silently against this, finding no traction whatever.

   “But if it’s a game, why did someone send those men to kill us? How’d you know the winning number in the lottery, Mr. Netherton?"

   “This isn’t…your world.”

   “So what is it?”

   “The future,” said Netherton, feeling utterly ridiculous. On impulse, he added the year.

   “No way.”

10. 

    “Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?”

    “The one who made such horrific stubs? All war, all the time?”

    “I’d wondered how he so quickly rendered them nightmares,” she said. “Eventually, I looked into it…Vespasian discovered a simple way of exaggerating the butterfly effect, or so it seems…On making contact, he’d immediately withdraw. Then return, months later, study the results, and very deliberately and forcefully intervene. He achieved remarkable if terrible results, and very quickly. Investigating his method, I happened on another of his so-called stubs, one in which he’d initiated contact in 2015, several years before the earliest previously known contact."

11. 

    People who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. Lowbeer had said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which had reminded Flynne of what her mother had said…That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room to become its bigger self, with more horrible results.

12. 

    "Their stuff’s all seventy years faster than ours,” Flynne said.

    “Okay,” he said, and she wondered if what she was seeing in his eyes was the Corps’ speed, intensity, violence of action, or his right way of seeing. Because he just got it. Ignored the crazy, went tactically forward.

    "Just lock everything down, really tight," she said. "We don’t know enough now to make any kind of move at all.”

    Burton looked at her. “Easy Ice,” he said, and she saw the shiver run through him in the moonlight, the haptic thing.