William Gibson Quotes

If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place.

There was coffee. Life would go on.

I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back. Because she was dead, and I'd let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I'd helped her get that way. And because I knew she'd phone me, in the morning.

Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour blackout that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight.

But then there are days when it's like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God's own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she'd merged with the net, crossed over for good...

We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand.

Kosmograd's hull rang again...
"East Los Angeles," the woman said. "That's the one with the kids in it." She took off her goggles, and Korolev saw her eyes brimming over with a wonderful lunacy.

"But why?" Korolev shook his head, deeply confused. "Why have you come?"
"We told you. To live here…Who'd want to live out here for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You have to want a frontier—want it in your bones, right?"
Korolev smiled. Andy grinned back.

Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth.

When the knocking came, he knew that it must be a dream as well.
The hatch wheeled open.
He saw that the woman was black. Long corkscrews of matted hair rose like cobras around her head.
"Andy," she said in English, "you better come see this!"
"Is he alive?"
"Of course I am alive." said Korolev in slightly accented English.
The man called Andy sailed in over her head. "You okay, Jack?" His right bicep was tattooed with a geodesic balloon above crossed lightning bolts and bore the legend SUNSPARK 15, UTAH. "We weren't expecting anybody."
"Neither was I," said Korolev, blinking.

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 sun balloons!" cried Grishkin, pointing toward the earth.\nKosmograd was above the coast of California now, clean shorelines, intensely green fields, vast decaying cities whose names rang with a strange magic. High above a fleece of stratocumulus floated five solar balloons, mirrored geodesic spheres tethered by power lines.\n"And they say that people live in those things?"

Colonel Korolev twisted slowly in his harness, dreaming of winter and gravity. Young again, a cadet, he whipped his horse across the late November steppes of Kazakhstan into dry red vistas of Martian sunset.

So now it's cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years...Charmian says that contact with "superior" civilizations is something you don't wish on your worst enemy.

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.