46 quotes
The future is not google-able.
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
The old man was as American as it got, but in what she thought of as some very recently archaic way. Someone who would’ve been in charge of something, in America, when grown-ups still ran things.
Colonel Korolev twisted slowly in his harness, dreaming of winter and gravity. Young again, a cadet, he whipped his horse across the late November steppes of Kazakhstan into dry red vistas of Martian sunset.
Burning Chrome (1986)
I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognize the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
I didn't imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace...but I'm glad that they're doing it.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand.
Burning Chrome (1986)
My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years' time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop. And it probably will.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)
They did striped shirts for him, brought the cotton from Charvet in Paris...
Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)
Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour blackout that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight.
Burning Chrome (1986)
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.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease.
Burning Chrome (1986)
In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing.
Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)
Deke looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference.
Burning Chrome (1986)
The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
There was coffee. Life would go on.
Burning Chrome (1986)
Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.
Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)