Quotes from William Gibson

Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface.

The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.

Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.

Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

Bevor man bei Sich eine Depression oder geringes Selbstwertgefühl diagnostiziert... sollte man sicher gehen, dass man nicht nur von Arschlöchern umgeben ist.

Otherwise, he'd have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow, very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died.

He never saw Molly again.

I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers.

Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.

So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway.

Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can't stop stealing.

Heidi's room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing. Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the plane down.

Ghosts are nothing if not capricious.

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys' game.

the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people.

Hollis blew gently on the thin tan island of foam afloat in her half pint of Guinness, to see it move, then drank some. Always a mysterious beverage to her. Unsure why she'd asked for it. She liked the way it looked more than how it tasted. How would it taste, she wondered, if it tasted the way she thought it looked? No idea.

Whenever the media do try to pick it up, it slides like a lone noodle from their chopsticks.

a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self.

Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.

Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon? What? Half-imaginary.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.