William Gibson Quotes

The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today.

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.

"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County," Kihn said. "I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted 'bya bar hade.'"\n"A what?"\n"A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer…Now that is the…straight goods from the mass unconscious. That little girl is a witch. There's just no place for her to function in this society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on 'The Bionic Man' and all those Star Trek reruns. She is clued into the main vein."

Another example — maybe a better one, in a way — was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter. A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply said, "This makes your job more difficult." And I knew exactly what he meant. Because something — a scenario — that seemed to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern, was suddenly real. It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.

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.

For more than three decades the Americans had been gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline. Space, he thought ruefully, they should have gone into space. He'd never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision.

The plus sign is a hipster ampersand.

That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.

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.

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.

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.

He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.

The street finds its own uses for things.

They had better luck with the seashell. Exobiology suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground: one and seven-tenths grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial. Olga's seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of...Olga's seashell.

"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."