William Gibson cytaty

strona 3

„Jeśli Bóg stworzył coś lepszego, zatrzymał to dla siebie.”

„Dwa razy przymierz, zanim raz utniesz.”

„Zawsze trzeba zostawić miejsce na przypadki, utrzymywał Win. Jeśli myślisz inaczej, uważasz, że wszystko jest tylko częścią powszechnego spisku, masz ciężką apofenię. Gdy już cieszysz się symetrią swojej wizji, to niemal na pewno grozi ci, iż przegapisz autentyczny ślad, zawsze mniej symetryczny, mniej doskonały, tyle że na pewno prawdziwy.”

„W epoce niezbyt kosztownego piękna, jego brzydota miała w sobie coś z symbolu.”

„Podobno przyrządzała własne nowotwory dla ludzi którzy weszli jej w drogę; barokowe indywidualne odmiany, zabijające przez cale lata. Wiele rzeczy opowiadano o Chrom, a żadna nie dodawała odwagi.”

„Przypominał rekombinowaną DNA z eksperymentu, którego celem było wyhodowanie człowieka do szybkościowego rycia tuneli.”

„Spryciarze wśród dzisiejszych muzyków umieszczają nowe kompozycje w sieci, jak pasztet do ostygnięcia na parapecie, i czekają, aż jacyś anonimowi muzycy dokonają przeróbek. (…) Proces twórczy nie dokonuje się już w głowie jednostki, jeśli kiedykolwiek tak było. Dzisiaj wszystko jest do pewnego stopnia odbiciem czegoś innego.”

„Cyberprzestrzeń. Mimowolna halucynacja doświadczana każdego dnia (…). Graficzny obraz danych, wyabstrahowanych z banków każdego komputera ludzkiej domeny. Niewyobrażalna złożoność. Linie światła sięgającego nie-przestrzeni umysłu, roje i konstelacje danych. Jak światła miasta, milknące w oddali…”

„Wyobrażasz sobie, że słyszysz w samym środku rozszeptanej ciszy nocy Nieba rozpad paradygmatów, cichutki brzęk skorup teorii rozsypujących się na lśniący pył, gdy jakiś bank mózgów ulega redukcji do najlapidarniejszego z historycznych przypisów, a to wszystko w czasie, którego twój uszkodzony podróżnik potrzebuje do mruknięcia pod nosem jakiegoś podsłuchanego fragmentu.”

„O przyszłości nie da się nic nowego powiedzieć. Przyszłość jest teraz, tylko nierówno rozłożona.”

„Ciemność. Syk klimatyzatora. Miękkość bawełnianej pościeli. Telefon pod poduszką. Odgłosy ulicznego ruchu stłumione przez wypełnione gazem okna. Opuszcza go całe napięcie i strach…”

„To zabawne, Sandii, jak czasem wydajesz mi się nierzeczywista. Fox powiedział kiedyś, że jesteś ektoplazmą, duchem przywoływanym przez ekstrema ekonomii. Upiorem nowego wieku, materializującym się w tysiącach łóżek świata Hyattów, świata Hiltonów.”

„Włamywacz naruszający wszechobecny elektroniczny system nerwowy ludzkości, popychający dane i kredyt w ciasnej matrycy, monochromatycznej nonprzestrzeni, gdzie jedynymi gwiazdami są gęste skupiska informacji, a wysoko nad nimi płoną korporacyjne galaktyki i zimne ramiona spiralne systemów wojskowych.”

“Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”

“Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.”

“Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.”

“Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were.”

“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”

“It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like… it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths.”

“In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic container without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of corridor, he changed his ticket.”

“The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding…The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.”

“"Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case."
The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh.
"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste."
The bartender shrugged. "I came back."
The man shook his massive, stubbled head. "Night City is not a place one returns to, artiste," he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whining.”

“It will bring about the extinction of the nation-state as we know it… I think it will be as big a deal as the creation of cities.”

“The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. "I said a week," Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. "You took your own good time." "Balls," Case said, smiling at the screen. "That's good work, Armitage." "Yes," Armitage admitted, "but don't let it go to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy."”

“So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in 'Heavy Metal'. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York', Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'", and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed 'cyberpunk.'”

“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”

“Don' 'stand you, mon, but we mus' move by Jah Love, each one”

“The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.”

“Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.”

“This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.”

“It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish.”

“Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.”

“"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?"
"Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."”

“Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.”

“As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.”
“You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.”

“When did you ever go to a drug dealer, and the drug dealer said, "you know, you should come back tomorrow, this is not very pure."”

“He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael.”

“Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me." "Who do you love?”

“Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human.”

“Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.
It’s called money, Lanette said.”

“The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she’d heard of but had no intention of buying.”

“Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.”