William Gibson

Quotes

1. "The folklore of console jockeys, Continuity. What do you know about…'When It Changed'?"

   "The mythform is usually encountered in one of two modes. One mode assumes that the cyberspace matrix is inhabited, or perhaps visited, by entities whose characteristics correspond with the primary mythform of a 'hidden people.' The other involves assumptions of omniscience, omnipotence, and incomprehensibility on the part of the matrix itself."

2. 

   “You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.

   Sally looked down. “Yeah.”

   “Why don’t you have it removed?”

   “Sometimes it’s good to remember.”

   “Being hurt?”

   “Being stupid.”

3. 

   It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out of a nowhere sky. [Mona Lisa] had never been to an airport before, but she knew them from the stims.

4. 

   That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.

5. 

   “You might begin by explaining this hobby of yours, Mr. Zubov…‘continua enthusiast.’”

   “You know about the server?”

   “The great mystery, yes. Assumed to be Chinese, and as with so many aspects of China today, quite beyond us. You use it to communicate with the past, or rather a past, since in our actual past, you didn’t. That rather hurts my head, Mr. Zubov."

   "The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.”

   "But why do you call them that?" Lowbeer asked. "It sounds short. Nasty. Brutish.”

6. 

   Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?

7. 

   Actually seeing the polt had been surprisingly interesting...driving, eyes on whatever motorway, seventy-some years earlier, on the far side of the jackpot…Gloriously pre-posthuman. In a state of nature. And hustling, Netherton had soon seen, eye on the money. Improvising, and with utterly unfamiliar material.

8. 

   The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

9. 

   They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him…like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance…

   So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek.

10. 

    “Do you print your own? Drones?”

    “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

    Netherton looked blank, then up and to his right. Appeared to read something. “You…do.”

11. 

    “Too much like asymmetric warfare.”

    "Terrorism.”

    “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, "if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.”

12. 

    "I am no spy."

    "Then start being your own. If Tokyo's the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire."