Quotes About Reality

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

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.

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

I'm not Wintermute now." "So what are you." He drank from the flask, feeling nothing. "I'm the matrix

Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren't constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.

You're from the future, Mr Netherton? Not exactly, he said. I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future. Here.

Google 'tulpa,'" Eunice said, "you get Tibetan occult thought-forms. Or people who've invented themselves an imaginary playmate." "I did." "Don't feel particularly Tibetan, myself," Eunice said. "Maybe invented, but how would I know?

The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.

We're all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn't need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened.

It's more the way it is now than it's ever been

Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning.

Case lowered the gun. "This is the matrix. You're Wintermute.

You're too young to remember it," Verity's mother said, "but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.

Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived.

But perhaps, she thinks, this isn't a Russian meal. Perhaps it's a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing.

and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. .

Okay, she said. What are the nodal points? Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. It's like seeing things in clouds, Laney said. Except the things you see are really there.

Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art." They walked on. "I think that already happened, back home

None of their voices were real, even; it was all digital stuff. God-eater could just as well be a woman, or three different people, or all three of the ones he'd seen there might've been just one person.

If you believe the journalists, he's the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there's the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No.

Le epoche danno conforto soprattutto a chi non ne ha mai fatto un'esperienza diretta. Definiamo la storia a partire da una complessità che va ben oltre la nostra portata. E applichiamo delle etichette ai risultati. Attribuiamo a essi una denominazione. E poi parliamo di queste denominazioni come se fossero cose che esistono veramente.