“Secrets...are the very root of cool.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“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, quote from Spook Country
“That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“The pop star, as we knew her" – and here he bowed slightly, in her direction – "was actually an artefact of preubiquitous media."
"Of -?"
"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."
"As opposed to?"
"Comprising it.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“The men in bars, who explain every dark secret of this world, Tito, have you noticed, no secret requires more than three drinks to explain. Who killed the Kennedys? Three drinks. America’s real motive in Iraq? Three drinks. The three-drink answers can never contain the truth. The”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“No idea. None whatever. That’s exactly what makes it so interesting.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“The full-on Townsend-Moon hooter. She only ever found this problematic in males who hadn’t become pop musicians; it seemed, then, in some weirdly inverted way, affected. It looked, to her, as though they’d grown large noses in order to look like rock musicians. More weirdly, perhaps, they all tended—certified accountants, radiologists, or whatever—to the flopping forelock that had traditionally gone with it, back in Muswell Hill or Denmark Street. This, she’d once reasoned, must be due in one of two ways to hairdressers. Either they saw the rock mega-nose and dressed the hair above it out of a call to historical tradition, or they weighed the issue in some instinctive, deeply hairdresserly way, arriving at that massive slash and heft of eye-obscuring forelock through some simple sense of balance.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
“He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.”
― William Gibson, quote from Spook Country
William Gibson
Born place: in Conway, South Carolina, The United States
Born date March 17, 1948
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“ICH BENDÜRFNES JESUS CHRISTUS HANGELENK
MEIN GEBEIN WEINEN
ODLAND, KRIEGSBIET, LEBENWEISE
GESCHWINDIGKEIT, HALBMESSER, ABSTEIG
GNAPENSTOB”
― James O'Barr, quote from The Crow
“How oft do they rescue or ruin us, through whimsy or design or a combination of both, the adults to whom we entrust our care!”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles, and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.
The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thickset figure encased in armor-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her disheveled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature
“He waited a moment, as they walked side by side through the camp, and then asked, 'Sir, if there's something we can't handle how do we handle it anyway?' She either grunted or laughed from the same place that grunts came from. 'Sawtooth wedges and keep going, Beak. Throw back whatever is thrown at us. Keep going, until. . .' 'Until what?' 'It's all right, Beak, to die alongside your comrades. It's all right. Do you understand me?' 'Yes sir, I do. It is all right, because they're my friends.' 'That's right, Beak.”
― Steven Erikson, quote from Reaper's Gale
“Well, you’re seeing what ain’t there.” Or what you wanted for yourself and never got. What we don’t get, we see everywhere we look. What we won’t let ourselves do, be, we refuse to tolerate in any other living soul. Arlene was beginning to notice this.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, quote from Pay It Forward
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