Quotes from Neuromancer

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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...”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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, quote from Neuromancer

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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, quote from Neuromancer

“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, quote from Neuromancer

“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, quote from Neuromancer

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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, quote from Neuromancer

“Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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, quote from Neuromancer

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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...”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug pilot.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

“Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory...”
― William Gibson, quote from Neuromancer

About the author

Popular quotes

“Tell me you're not going to do anything stupid." "I'm not that kind of guy, Peter." "Not usually, no. But I've seen the look you've got in your eyes. A guy so consumed with his demons he'd throw himself on a min to escape it. Then they send the little polished medal home to the people who love him. You've got a lot of people who care about you, Ben. Don't do that to them. If you don't trust yourself tonight, then let me shadow you." Ben sighed, looked back out in the darkness. "Fine, but keep a distance. I don't want anyone to think we're dating." "No chance of that. I wouldn't be caught dead dating an ambulance chaser.”
― Joey W. Hill, quote from Hostile Takeover

“When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage”

“Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time,” she said.”
― K.J. Bishop, quote from The Etched City

“With a quick check, he pulls out onto the road and we roar off in a trail of dust, leaving my stomach still somewhere on his driveway and my heart completely in his hands.”
― Samantha Towle, quote from First Bitten

“REVISITING THE LIST
1. Kiss Estelle
Okay, at least I've met her. She thinks I'm a creep. And that's withought her knowing I've read her diaries. Unless we somehow fall over, exactly aligned, lip to lip, and gravity causes the pressure, or we find ourselves in a darkened room and through a series of Shakespearian ID muddles she thinks she's kissing someone else, I can't say how this is ever going to happen.”
― Fiona Wood, quote from Six Impossible Things

“there’s really nowhere else I can go, and even if there were, it wouldn’t make a difference
because I’d just be running from myself, and you can’t do that no matter how hard you
try, and trying hard is what got you in this predicament in the first place.”
― Pete Wentz, quote from Gray

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.