“Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“I am no spy.” “Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could. That was why he had built the Judge, because he’d done something—it hadn’t been anything much, but he’d been caught doing it, twice—and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn’t been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people’s cars. They made sure you remembered what you did.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Pretty soon the crash would come on, and before then she’d have to figure out a way to get back to the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things to do, angles to figure, and that was the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“He could have anything in there,” Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. “A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs …”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Because sometimes it feels good to shake it all off, get out from under. Chances are, we haven’t. But maybe we have. Maybe nobody, nobody at all, knows where we are. Nice feeling, huh? You could be kinked, you ever think of that? Maybe your dad, the Yak warlord, he’s got a little bug planted in you so he can keep track of his daughter. You got those pretty little teeth, maybe Daddy’s dentist tucked a little hardware in there one time when you were into a stim. You go to the dentist?” “Yes.” “You stim while he works?” “Yes …” “There you go. Maybe he’s listening to us right now.…”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“London,” Bobby said. “She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They’ve been fading, sort of blurring. You can still raise em, sometimes, but their personalities run together.…”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine:”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry’s pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway? Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father’s evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more fascinating than frightening.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn’t in cyberspace anymore, it just was.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“How were they weird?” “Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ’n’ shit. Wanna know something, Moll?” “What?” “They’re right.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vévés transparent.…”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“If there were such a being,” she said, “you’d be a part of it, wouldn’t you?” “Yes.” “Would you know?” “Not necessarily.” “Do you know?” “No.” “Do you rule out the possibility?” “No.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He’d stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. “There are worlds within worlds,” he said. “Macrocosm, microcosm.”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
“Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. “There are worlds within worlds,” he said. “Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below.… It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I’d not dared to hope.…”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive
William Gibson
Born place: in Conway, South Carolina, The United States
Born date March 17, 1948
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“Things are more exciting when one unveils them bit by bit. One looses interest fast when they’re too easy.”
― Cristiane Serruya, quote from Trust: A New Beginning
“The thought of revenge always gave her a warm fuzzy feeling.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from The Opal Deception
“A girl who would never play in a tournament. She'd been butchered by agents of the Red Rose when they'd been unable to steal her away.”
― Cinda Williams Chima, quote from The Warrior Heir
“One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream —nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Aleph and Other Stories
“Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal.”
― Michel Houellebecq, quote from The Elementary Particles
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Catechism of the Cat...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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