|
5a7504b
|
The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
49ceb59
|
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
1978813
|
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
|
|
engineering
psychoanalysis
psychology
|
William Gibson |
|
1b324e1
|
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 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...
|
|
cyberspace
internet
|
William Gibson |
|
707e8bf
|
Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
|
|
time
|
William Gibson |
|
9448c3c
|
I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
7750221
|
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
|
|
wealth
|
William Gibson |
|
a271ea7
|
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stan..
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
80656df
|
Secrets...are the very root of cool.
|
|
secrets
|
William Gibson |
|
1128772
|
He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
05a1d90
|
Things aren't different. Things are things.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
2611f20
|
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
|
|
life-lessons
inspirational
|
William Gibson |
|
10eb1d6
|
All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void...
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
9c8241a
|
Time is money, but also money is money.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
81b978e
|
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
d5d70aa
|
Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
4c45e24
|
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.
|
|
labels
social-commentary
trends
society
|
William Gibson |
|
c4b7a20
|
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.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
e948c94
|
When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
b514d29
|
Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It ha..
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
6963d08
|
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."
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
fc28749
|
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
c9fbaa0
|
A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation."
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
5f0d9b5
|
Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.
|
|
cigarettes
|
William Gibson |
|
3f0a3e4
|
You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency." "Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency."
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
bb7833b
|
We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
58abd0b
|
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar- winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
c71608b
|
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." --
|
|
future
|
William Gibson |
|
d986b08
|
Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
f687e23
|
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
|
|
dream-state
fading
slipping-away
vulnerability
lost
|
William Gibson |
|
1bf0b0e
|
You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
65276b8
|
Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.
|
|
futurism
gibson
leapfrogging
|
William Gibson |
|
7b88a38
|
Because people who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
46e74a6
|
Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
1db4002
|
Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
66bd3db
|
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.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
5e34ff4
|
Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
d6ff522
|
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 cam..
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
4664cdc
|
That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
|
|
war
technology
|
William Gibson |
|
a95b70d
|
Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
c5a824e
|
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
aef7ef5
|
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.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
596299e
|
It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.
|
|
|
William Gibson |
|
0623f0d
|
His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
|
|
|
William Gibson |