Cyberpunk Quotes

“Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.”
― Jess C. Scott, The Darker Side of Life

“Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“Your life is a beer glass Micah, but you want champagne”
― Barry Kirwan, The Eden Paradox

“Perhaps Mozart’s Requiem would be fitting music for the end of the world. She began to hum Dies Irae, recalling its first performance in Vienna.”
― Barry Kirwan, The Eden Paradox

“Beef had hit $300 a kilo. Not that he could recall the last time he’d tasted real beef.”
― Barry Kirwan, The Eden Paradox

“It has no eyes. Zack, why doesn’t it have any eyes? ”
― Barry Kirwan, The Eden Paradox

“The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

Quellcrist Falconer
Things I Should Have Learned by Now, Volume II”
― Richard K. Morgan

“She stared at her console, wanting to punch it. Her dream, running to save her life, to save everything, was all going to come true down on the planet’s surface. And when it did, she knew this time she wasn’t going to wake up.”
― Barry Kirwan, The Eden Paradox

“He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“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

“Take it from me, kid, sometimes it’s okay to run. You run as fast as you damn well can.”
― Barry Kirwan, The Eden Paradox

“I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.”
― William Gibson

“What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?”
― Clyde Dsouza, Memories With Maya

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
― Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

“For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.”
― Rudy Rucker

“He got one finger cut off when he was young... The cafe paid for a replacement, put some nano-plastic in there. The kid got hooked. It happens. You get some plastic in you, you just want some more...Some more of that strength. Because that's what it is. Strength. The Strength to persist.”
― Jeff Noon, Vurt

“Only the framing material," Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

“Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level-2?”
― Nick Land

“Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“No good thing renders its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of loss.”
― Tade Thompson, Rosewater

“Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.”
― Tade Thompson, Rosewater

“Life seemed ideal to him right then, and he was happy for the first time in a long time, and it felt like the sun was shining from his heart." - from the novel Brainjob by David Sloma.”
― David Sloma, Brainjob

“Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“I want to tell you that it's horrible. I want to tell you that being suppressed makes every moment of existence a torment, because maybe that would help--but it would be a lie. In fact, the most horrible thing is how easy it is to slide into contentment, how hard it is to nourish anger or regret. If you lose the sense of smell, say, or taste, you'd grieve for it; but if you were born without that sense, you'd never miss it. That's how it was for me--the sense was gone, as though it has never been. For the first few years after suppression, I kept myself in misery by sheer effort of will, trying to imagine, every day, what it was that I had lost. But in the end, it became to much trouble. I gave in to the inevitable. I forgot.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“Raccogli le tue ossa, le poche certezze che hai, la tua residua fiducia nella vita e diamoci una mossa. Morire può essere un fatto spiacevole, ma se proprio dobbiamo farla questa cosa, lasciandoci le palle, allora facciamola come si deve.”
― Michael B. Morgan, Root Legacy: AI confini della coscienza - con Illustazioni (SciFi and Cyberpunk stories)

“Poi Net si concentra sulle gocce che schizzano luminose nelle pozzanghere che le inghiottono una ad una. Tutt'intorno, marciscono i resti di pseudo-vite fatte di alcolici a buon mercato, sigarette e rifiuti di droga. E c'è una puzza di confine, di frontiera, che esala da ogni angolo.”
― Michael B. Morgan, Root Legacy: AI confini della coscienza - con Illustazioni (SciFi and Cyberpunk stories)