430 Quotes by William Gibson

Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there’s something new, I’ll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it’s on sale. So I have last year’s stuff.

Music was strange that way though; there were people into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time.

It doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists.

Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.

He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage.

His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.

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

It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction.

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive held.