Bruce Sterling > Quotes

“Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.”
― Bruce Sterling

“You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.”
― Bruce Sterling

“America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.”
― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

“The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.”
― Bruce Sterling

“In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?”
― Bruce Sterling

“A dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs”
― Bruce Sterling, The Parthenopean Scalpel

“«I love both her and them. I have come to understand that she is what they are. A woman accepts a man, expecting that he will change. A man takes a woman, expecting that she will never change. They are both disappointed. Yet within this very disappointment is the primal source of all new men and all new women»”
― Bruce Sterling, Different Kinds of Magic

“You give a guy a license to
steal, you've got to expect him to use it.”
― Bruce Sterling

“...We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.'
We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials.”
― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

“(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute”
― Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix

“BRUCE STERLING Homo sapiens declared extinct, Nature, November 11, 1999:

Since I've been asked to offer an epitaph," the highly distributed poetware continued, "I believe that we should rearrange the Great Wall of China to spell out (in Chinese of course, since most of them were always Chinese) -- 'THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FAR-SIGHTED.”
― Bruce Sterling

“I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess.”
― Bruce Sterling, Distraction

“The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.”
― Bruce Sterling

“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.”
― Bruce Sterling, Burning Chrome

“For a moment, sincere human fury had burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, then he'd been for years.”
― Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix Plus