“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
“I don't want anyone else but sometimes, surprisingly, there's someone, not the prettiest or the most available, but you know that in another life it would be her. Or him, don't you find? A small quickening. The room responds slightly to being entered. Like a raised blind. Nothing intended, and a long way from doing anything, but you catch the glint of being someone else's possibility, and it's a sort of politeness to show you haven't missed it, so you push it a little, well within safety, but there's that sense of a promise almost being made in the touching and kissing without which no one can seem to say good morning in this poney business and one more push would do it.
-The Real Thing (London 1982), p.73
Today, I bought a copy of the play at the co-op, I thought I should send it to you- out of a sort of politeness.”
― quote from The Divorce Papers
“It wasn’t easy.
Nothing worth doing ever is.
And love is worth everything.”
― quote from Undeniable
“Kokį moralinį, kokį istorinį pateisinimą būtų galima sugalvoti tiesiem, kurie kitus tokia lengva širdimi siunčia į koncentracijos lagerius? Jokios politinės, jokios religinės, jokios pasaulėžiūrinės idėjos jų niekuomet nepateisins! Jie savo žmogiškąją menkystą galėtų atpirkti tiktai tuomet, jei patys savo dienas baigtų tose pačiose sąlygose, į kurias kitus tremia, besivadovaudami pamišėliškomis idėjinėmis fikcijomis! Kitaip amžių prakeikimas slėgs ne tik jų atmintį, slėgs ir jų palikuonių palikuonis!”
― Balys Sruoga, quote from Forest of the Gods
“Your a skid-mark on the underwear of humanity. -Ostin Liss”
― Richard Paul Evans, quote from Battle of the Ampere
“When I put my mouth on hers for the first time, it's fucking magic. I can't describe what she tastes like except that it's everything that's right with the world. ”
― Sabrina Paige, quote from Prick
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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