William Gibson

Quotes

1. And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy’s, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he’d been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would.

2. 

   He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window.…Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him.

   The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing.

3. 

   Leon had to come into town to do contractually obligated promo media with a crew from the lottery, with, he said, the douchebag he’d bought the ticket from.

   “If he’s a douchebag,” Flynne asked, “why’d you buy the ticket from him?”

   “’Cause I knew it would burn his ass so bad, when I won,” Leon said.

4. 

   Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.

   It’s called money, Lanette said.

5. 

   “They won’t say what it is. Like we’re beta-testing something. Said they’re in Colombia."

   “Colombia was a drug place before there were builders,” said Edward. “Now it’s a money place. Like Switzerland…The files they sent. We’re being asked to fab something that we can’t find any record of having been built before.”

   “Could be corporate espionage,” said Macon. “That would be interesting. Haven’t gone there before. That has our attention.”

6. 

   Netherton’s eyes widened, preparing to pitch something he hadn’t yet invented, none of what he’d said so far having been true.

   [Daedra's] head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like.

   …And then she smiled.

   Rainey’s sigil privacy-dimmed. “I’d want to have your baby now,” she said, from Toronto, “except I know it would always lie.”

7. 

   Smith had a visitor, unannounced…A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vat-grown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master.

8. 

   "I got a little story for you about them…Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.

   The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's story, a man he called Smith. Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another.

9. 

   He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted.

10. 

    He was good as new. How good was that? He didn’t know. He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of Singapore. Home was the next airport Hyatt.

11. 

    It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths.

12. 

    For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.