Count Zero (The Neuromancer Trilogy)

by William Gibson

all around her, at other tables, strangers ate and smiled, drank and argued, said bitter goodbyes or swore private fealties to an afternoon’s feeling. But – she smiled – she was a part of it all. Something in her was waking from a long and stifled sleep, brought back into the light in the instant she’d fully opened her eyes to Alain’s viciousness and her own desperate need to continue loving him.

It was sometimes best, when you came to the mystery that was art, to come as a child. The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.

Summer had come, the sky hot and blue above Paris, and she smiled at the smell of good bread and black tobacco.