Quotes from Pattern Recognition

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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 stand on. 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”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Time is money, but also money is money.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Damien is a friend.
Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones.
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull's tested positive. Twice.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“She isn't feeling easy with any of this. She doesn't know quite what to do with Bigend's proposition, which has kicked her into one of those modes that her therapist, when she last had one, would lump under the rubric of 'old behaviors.' It consisted of saying no, but somehow not quite forcefully enough, and then continuing to listen. With the result that her 'no' could be gradually chipped away at, and turned into a 'yes' before she herself was consciously aware that this was happening. She had thought she had been getting much better around this, but now she feels it happening again.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“She [Cayce Pollard] feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people’s objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“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. She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the nameless hour deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and less interesting?”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“У душ есть ограничение по скорости, они отстают от самолетов и прибывают с задержкой, как потерявшийся багаж.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves,”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“But, Hubertus," Cayce offers, "what if Dorothea is..."
"Yes?" He leans forward, palms flat on the table.
"A vicious lying cunt?"
Bigend giggles, a deeply alarming sound. "Well," he says, "we are in the business of advertising, after all." He smiles.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“But perhaps, she thinks, this isn’t a Russian meal. Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge. She wonders why she bought it. The tabloid doesn’t go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

“she's learned it's largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She's met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question.”
― William Gibson, quote from Pattern Recognition

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Popular quotes

“Bobby ran up on the deck and skidded to a stop in front of them. “It’s time for the Kowalski Fourth of July Football Game of Doom!”
Cat laughed and pushed herself out of her seat. “We’ll talk about this some other time, Emma. Go have fun.”
“I’m not sure I want to play football. Especially if there’s doom involved,” she said, but Bobby grabbed her hand and dragged her off the deck.
They were divvied up into teams roughly by size, each with an assortment of men, women and children. Emma was on Sean’s team, which was good. She’d just hide behind him, because the only thing she knew about football was that it involved a lot of hitting.
It only took a few plays to see that the Kowalskis played by their own rules and the few they had were fluid. Mostly they served to ensure the smaller kids didn’t get plowed over, victims of the adults’ competitive streak.
Five minutes into the game, Emma somehow ended up with the ball. She squealed and looked around for somebody—anybody—to hand it off to, but there was nobody. Well, there was Danny, but he was doubled over in laughter.
“Run, Emma,” Lisa yelled.
She ran in the direction her friend was frantically waving her hand, but she only went a few feet before two very strong arms wrapped around her waist and then she was falling. Luckily, she landed on a body instead of the ground.
“I love football,” Mitch said, grinning up at her.
Emma grimaced and managed to get one of her knees on solid ground so she could push herself to her feet. He was quicker and freed himself to stand and help her up.
“They should give you the ball more often,” he said, his blue eyes sparkling and the grin so like Sean’s—but not quite as naughty—in full force.
“Hands off my girl,” Sean told him, pulling on Emma’s elbow.
“You should do a better job of blocking for her.
“Let’s go,” Brian shouted.
The very next play, Mitch intercepted Mike’s pass to Evan and turned to run toward the other end zone. He was halfway there when Sean took him down hard. They hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud that made Emma wince, and came up pushing and shoving.
When Sean drew back his arm to throw the first punch, Mary blew her whistle from the sidelines. “Boys! Enough!”
Instead of heading straight for the huddle, Sean walked to Emma and pulled her into his arms for a hard, almost punishing caveman kiss that made her skin sizzle and her knees go wobbly. Then he glared at his brother for a few long seconds and went back to his team, leaving Emma standing there breathless and discombobulated.”
― Shannon Stacey, quote from Yours to Keep

“Peut-être que vous étiez allongé au lit, presque sur le point de vous endormir, et vous avez ri de quelque chose, une plaisanterie toute personnelle, une bonne façon de finir la journée. C'est ça, mon nom.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from The Tokyo-Montana Express

“What is the denunciation with which we are charged? It is endeavoring, in our faltering human speech, to declare the enormity of the sin of making merchandise of men,—of separating husband and wife,—taking the infant from its mother, and selling the daughter to prostitution,—of a professedly Christian nation denying, by statute, the Bible to every sixth man and woman of its population, and making it illegal for ‘two or three’ to meet together, except a white man be present! What is this harsh criticism of motives with which we are charged?”
― Dolen Perkins-Valdez, quote from Wench

“Jai pointed at the car. "Get in the car. I'm pissed at you for getting out of it in the first place."

Outrage lit through her. "Hey, I'm a big girl, I can make my own decisions."
"Get in the car, Ari!" Charlie yelled now, his own eyes glittering with anger.

Her mouth fell open, her cheeks blazing with indignation as the two men in her life stared at her, their expressions implacable. She made a 'pfft' sound and whirled around, stomping like a child towards the car.

"Too much testosterone, infuriating cavemen, need someone else to boss around, stupid jerks..." she kept muttering insults under her breath until Charlie and Jai had cleared the road.”
― Samantha Young, quote from Scorched Skies

“His arrival detonated two sheepdogs that began barking even before they emerged at a dead run from behind the garage. ”
― Anita Shreve, quote from Testimony

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