William Gibson

Quotes

1. 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.

2. 

   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.

3. 

   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.

4. 

   Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals…and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes.

5. 

   Flynne pictured the stuff in Conner’s yard, humped over with morning glory vines, and imagined him never joining the Marines. So that he’d stayed here, found some unfunny way to make a living, met a girl, gotten married. Had kids. And his wife getting all the morning glory cleared away, and everything hauled off, and planting grass for a real front yard. But she couldn’t make it stick, couldn’t quite believe it, and she wished she could.

6. 

   I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling.

7. 

   “Who called you?” Burton asked, seated behind Tommy, in the Faraday cage where they put prisoners.

   “State AI. Satellite noticed the vehicle hadn’t moved for two hours. Also flagged your property for unusual drone activity, but I told ’em that was you and your friends playing games.”

   “Appreciate it.”

   “How long you intend to be playing?”

   “Hard to say.”

   “Kind of a special tournament?”

   “Kind of.”

8. 

   “And they’re dead?” she’d asked.

   “Probably.”

   “A long time ago?”

   “Before the jackpot.”

   “But alive, in the past?…Why haven’t I heard of it before?”

   “It’s new. It’s quiet…Something to do with quantum tunneling.”

   “How far back can they go?”

   “2023, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”

9. 

   “You’re a publicist,” Rainey said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”

10. 

    "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."

11. 

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

12. 

    “Password?”

    “Easy Ice, lowercase, no space.”

    “That’s such a shit password, it’s not even a password.”

    “I’m a just normal fucking person, Macon.”

    “Normal fucking people never do whatever it is you’re about to.” He smiled.