The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.
The street finds its own uses for things.
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
We see in order to move; we move in order to see.
Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.
He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
Secrets...are the very root of cool.
All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void...
Time is money, but also money is money.
The present tense made him nervous.
Things aren't different. Things are things.
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.
To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
´Wonderful´, the Flatline said,´I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.´
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Hell of a world we live in, huh? (...) But it could be worse, huh?" "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect.
Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.
Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.
You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.
I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.
Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.
We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.
Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.
That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.
His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.
My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.
Because 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.
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His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)
Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.
Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar- winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word.
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.
Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.
And don't forget to water the fuckin' goldfish.
You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go.
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.
Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.
Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug pilot.
The faces he woke up with in the worlds hotels were like God's own hood ornaments. Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void.
I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull's tested positive. Twice.
Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.
His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.
INTO HER DARKNESS, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams.
Laney felt the pills he'd taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding.
When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.
Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy.
You need to learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work
Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.
It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence.
In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride.
Otherwise, he'd have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow, very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died.
All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written.
Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.
Stability is the beginning of the end. We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.
A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil.
Fables from before the Anaheiming.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.
Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?
She's right, Kate's right, I'm right and you're wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?
Honey,” Jammer said, “you’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.
Bevor man bei Sich eine Depression oder geringes Selbstwertgefühl diagnostiziert... sollte man sicher gehen, dass man nicht nur von Arschlöchern umgeben ist.
Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.
...destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.
Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon?" "What?" "Half-imaginary.
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters.
A chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one.
Burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.
The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.
THEY ATE LUNCH in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.
I am no spy.” “Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire.
Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.
Fuck it. Just fuck it.
Berry,” Pursley said, “you’re in trouble, son. A cop. And an honest one. In trouble. In deep, spectacular, and, please, I have to say this, clearly heroic shit.
She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn't help solve them, but she hasn't really found an alternative yet. Surely you can't just leave them there.
He robbed a bank in Wichita.
It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it.
I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS
A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata,
