Altered Carbon Quotes
"Chemically alert, I inventoried the hardware on the scarred wooden table for the fiftieth time that night."
"Most of the clips were black-wrapped. Sarah had used up a lot of green on the security guards at Gemini Biosys the previous night."
"The big silver Smith & Wesson, and the four remaining hallucinogen grenades."
"I heard the mosquito whine of monomolecular splinters across the room as she put three shots into the lead commando."
"I felt the sting as two of them found homes in my face."
"I came out of the corner without conscious thought, and the commando was too late to bring the Kalashnikov around."
"The Smith & Wesson was at eye level, gleaming silver, still where I had left it less than two minutes before."
"In the Envoy Corps they teach you to let go before storage. Stick it in neutral and float."
"Whatever you feel, whatever you’re thinking, whatever you are when they store you, that’s what you’ll be when you come out."
"The manual says you’re supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved, but then she’d probably read my file and didn’t consider meeting the police much of an event in my lifestyle."
"You can transmit the information, via hyperspatial needlecast, so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology."
"When you don’t like the laws, you go somewhere they can’t touch you."
"The stars were still something to stare at. Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago."
"There was a sudden enthusiasm in her tone that I liked her better for."
"Most of my life. While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground."
"You think I could have got into Bancroft’s house? I know I couldn’t, because I ran the specs. If there was any way in, I would have taken it a year ago, and you would have found little pieces of him scattered on the lawn."
"Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this."
"There’s a deal. This … person … gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs a man’s body."
"It’s not parole. You know what I went down for?"
"I’m not promising anything. Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all."
"They say it was terrorists. Or sonar failure in a storm. Maybe both."
"There’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning."
"You want to know what she said? She said, 'Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back.'"
"If you’re good, like she was, and you’ve got the equipment, you can sample those signals. They call them mindbites."
"The ground ghosted by beneath me the way it had beneath Jimmy de Soto in my dream."
"You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys."
"One day you own a house, your sleeve policy’s paid up, the next you’re on the street looking at a single lifespan."
"You’re chasing leads, Kovacs. You went down to Jerry’s to follow up something Bancroft did there."
"Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire."
"A weapon is a tool. A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy."
"In reality, and whatever it costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from."
"You don’t stop caring. You see it all sliding past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all. Draining away."
"When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts."
"There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out."
"The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar in your ears."
"Good," she breathed, and removed the blaster.
"You check out with Ray, I’ll line up and apologize with everybody else."
"But until then you’re just another potential wipeout gibbering for your stack."
"Couple of minutes. You just sit quiet and no peeking. I’ll tell you when."
"You aren’t where you come from. You’re on Earth. Try behaving like it."
"She’s dead," I told the shocked face, and held up the blaster.
"Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking about. You know, she volunteered to take that test."
"The story goes, one evening as her children were getting ready to go out, she spiked their coffee with something."
"Tengu are multi-talented. However many times it replaced itself, after a few days the new portions began to putrefy."
"You reckon we’ll get anything useful out of the wreckage?"
"But I don’t know. With designer hormones, that’s likely to be more expensive than just buying it in from down south."
"I’m giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to."
"We’re talking about microsecond intrusion here. Any longer and it’d ring bells from here to Sacramento."
"Over my head, autocabs wove in and out of the traffic with programmed hyper-efficiency."
"With an AI gunning for you, your only hope is to drop out of the electronic plane."
"Every building, every vehicle, every street is jacked into the web, and every transaction you make tags you for the datahounds."
"‘The human eye is a wonderful device,’ I quoted from Poems and Other Prevarications absently. ‘With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.’"
"In systems evasion, you must scramble the enemy’s assumptions, run as much interference as you can without breaking pace."
"To actually remove the locater will require microsurgery similar to its placement."
"The only place you get to do that is on stack."
"The truth was that I’d been a poor travelling companion for Trepp for most of the journey."
"I’m an Envoy. It’s in my nature to look for ways to rip Kawahara’s throat out."
"Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity."
"What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me."
"Our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done."
"Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux."
"Anything you wish to even perceive as an Envoy, let alone create or achieve, must be carved out of that flux."
"The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever."
"If you couldn’t even meet the same person twice in one lifetime, what did that say about all the families and friends waiting?"
"The corporates do whatever turns a profit."
"It was something that I had never—as far as I knew—been subject to in the Corps, and I had certainly never trusted any machine enough to do it once I was operating in a criminal context."
"Initially, no. It will know everything that you knew when you exited from the format and no more."
"Third time lucky, they say. Allow me to show you something."
"I'm all finished here in any case. Bancroft’s sold, Kawahara will keep her word."
"Got to get to the next screen, Kristin. That’s all."
"It’s a shithole. Got to get to the next screen."
"You take what is offered, and that must sometimes be enough."
"We’re not dealt in, we’re thrown in, and after that, it’s just about keeping your head above water."
"Human life has no value, intrinsic to itself."
"I shook my head. ‘I didn’t ask to be dealt in.’"
"You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves."
"The sensation was a dimly remembered joy, something this sleeve did not recall at a cellular level."
"It’s the truth, Kristin. It’s been the truth since I was born a hundred and fifty years ago."
"I was young and stupid. I was used. I killed for people like you because I knew no better. Then I learnt better."
"That’s the truth, Kristin. It’s been the truth since I was born a hundred and fifty years ago and from what I read in the history books, it’s never been any different. Better get used to it."
"Like the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw material—that’s all you’ve ever been."