Best All Tomorrow's Parties Quotes by William Gibson

"In the context of the station, their inhabitants are rendered invisible."

"It's all going to change, we're coming up on the mother of all nodal points."

"The syndrome finally kicked in. The 5-SB. The stalker effect."

"The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment."

"The door swings gently open, but he does not draw the blade fully."

"Job security? Doing this shit? Are you crazy?"

"Une petite problemette. Concerns you, I think."

"You should not drink cold things so quickly."

"But what was there, he wonders, before? Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney."

"He finds the passageway between the two escalators, the tiled columns. He half suspects that the shelters will be gone."

"Something has happened to him since his descent into the cardboard city. He has started to see that previously he had, in some unthinkably literal way, no self."

"He would," says the unseen man. "We have profiles," the man with the scarf says, off-camera, the face of the corpse thrown across Laney’s cardboard wall, the melon blanket. "We have a full forensic psych run-up. But you ignore them."

"And that is why sleep is no longer an option."

"He is neither a smoker nor a drinker, has taken to tossing back the contents of very small brown glass bottles of a patent specific for hangover, an archaic but still-popular Japanese remedy that consists of alcohol, caffeine, aspirin, and liquid nicotine."

"The wound, in close-up, is a small unsmiling mouth. The blood reads black. 'Not to me.'"

"There is movement, and potential for greater movement still, and he wonders why he is no longer afraid."

"Rydell remembered sitting with a beer somewhere, years ago, watching the partition ceremonies on CNN, and it hadn’t impressed him much even then."

"And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it."

"Line up outside Ghetto Chef, a place with steamed-up windows, prices painted in what looked like nail polish on a sheet of cardboard."

"He remembered how Chevette had told him that the bridge people and the police had an understanding: the bridge people stayed on the bridge, mostly, and the police stayed off it, mostly."

"Are you a violent person?"
Rydell hesitated. "No."

"Then his work ethic caught up with him. He took off the glasses, put them in his jacket, and started putting his shoes back on."

"It’s the music of a disenfranchised, mostly white proletariat, barely hanging on in post-post-industrial America."

"He lies dead straight, atop the blanket of gray lambs wool made up in military fashion, in his gray flannel shirt with its platinum links, his black trousers, his black wool socks."

"Laney’s progress through all the data in the world (or that data’s progress through him) has long since become what he is, rather than something he merely does."

"It is as though he becomes a single retina, distributed evenly across the inner surface of a sphere. Unblinking, he stares, globally, into that eye, seeing that with which he sees."

"He is starting to be aware of someone else watching."

"The vintage plastic Gunsmith Cats alarm watch pulls him from the flow."

"Laney, she said you told her the world was going to end."

"You have to go to the site of a double homicide."

"It's an absurd launch," Harwood says, "but then it's an insane service. It works because it's redundant, understand? It's too dumb not to work."

"People are fascinated by the pointlessness of it. That’s what they like about it. Yes, it’s crazy, but it’s fun."

"People are frightened of nanotechnology, Noriko. We know that."

"Because Lucky Dragon is about convenience. Lucky Dragon is about being able to purchase those things you need, really need, when you need them, twenty-four seven."

"Fontaine, there are men on the bridge with guns."

"The bridge isn’t noted for adherence to firearms regulations, you know."

"I’m picking up flames on two cameras," Tessa said. "This sucker’s on fire."

"It’s really not here anymore," she said, as if she didn’t quite believe herself.

"Gotcha," Laney says, to the dark in his fetid box, down amid the subsonic sighing of commuter trains and the constant clatter of passing feet.

"I’m sorry," he said. "I’m sorry about your shop..."

"I’m signed. They flew up this morning. What are you doing up there?"

"Gentlemen," said Fontaine, feeling a frustration that he didn’t understand, "you may start your fucking engines."

"The bed," Silencio says. "You were here with Sandro, when we restored that Vacheron."

"I’m fucked," Creedmore says, "Randy’s canceled my contract and the goddamn bridge has burned down. Some debut, huh? Jesus."