William Gibson

“Misero un segugio esplosivo sulle tracce di Turner a Nuova Delhi, sintonizzato sui suoi feromoni e sul colore dei capelli. Lo raggiunse in una strada chiamata Chandni Chauk, e si lanciò verso la sua BMW noleggiata, fra una selva di gambe nude e brune e ruote di tassì a pedale. Il nucleo era costituito da un chilogrammo di esogene ricristallizzato e TNT in scaglie.Turner non lo vide arrivare. L'ultima cosa che vide dell'India fu la facciata rosa di un posto che si chiamava Khush-Oil Hotel.”

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”

“Something he’d found and lost so many times. 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.”

“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.”

“Yeah, it's so popular it's almost legal. The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways.”

“Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?”

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

“I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell?”

“Are you - are you sad?" - No. "But your - your songs are sad." - My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells.”

“You need to learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work”

“There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.”

“She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.”

“Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.”

“Fables from before the Anaheiming.”

“The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, 'in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. 'Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”

“Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.”

“I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by he admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine, and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of, shall we say, a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: "Is anyone else hearing this?”

“And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.”

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”

“The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.”

“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.”

“And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.”

“Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug pilot.”

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

“CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention. What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.”

“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.”

“Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.”

“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.”

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”

“Wonderful", the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.”

“You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go.”

“Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of dirt poor places a million years ago. Voodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?”

“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.”

“Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.”

“A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.”

“Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?" Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to."Malaysia?""The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension.""Oh.""Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade.""Are you joking?""Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?""Yes."She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique.""How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?""Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law.”

“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.”

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.”

“Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.”

“I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull's tested positive. Twice.”

“Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like and aged cheese.”

“Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine and the local tailoring, just off his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it.”

“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.”

“Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others”

“When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.”

“His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.”

“‎Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky.They made a lot of nature shows there.”

“You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required.”

“You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.”

“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.”