Zero History Quotes

“When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience--that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces....Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility....”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell?”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Fables from before the Anaheiming.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Listen to your enemies,’ ” Bigend said, “ ‘for God is speaking.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Hollis blew gently on the thin tan island of foam afloat in her half pint of Guinness, to see it move, then drank some. Always a mysterious beverage to her. Unsure why she’d asked for it. She liked the way it looked more than how it tasted. How would it taste, she wondered, if it tasted the way she thought it looked? No idea.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas....
Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Heidi’s room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing. Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the plane down.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Voytek is here, to fuck penguin.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Why were these giant projects so relatively common in Europe? He’d grown up with the unquestioned assumption that America was the home of heroic infrastructure, but was it, now? He didn’t think so. How did they pay for these things here? Taxes?”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“He thought of his therapist. If she were here, he told himself, she’d remind him that this situation, however complexly threatening or dangerous, was external, hence entirely preferable to the one he’d been in when he’d arrived in Basel, a situation both internal and seemingly inescapable. “Do not internalize the threat. When you do, the system floods with adrenaline, cortisol. Crippling you.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“She’d yet to see a book in any Bigendian environment. He was a creature of screens, of bare expanses of desk or table, empty shelves. He owned, as far as she knew, no art. In some way, she suspected, he regarded it as competition, noise to his signal.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“All the while aware of his addiction, awakened by the flood of stress chemicals, urgently advising him that something to take the edge off would be a very good idea indeed. It was, some newer part of him thought, amazed, like having a Nazi tank buried in your back yard. Grown over with grass and dandelions, but then you noticed its engine was still idling.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Aubrey Beardsley.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“fantasist”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Not that he was unconcerned with the pain he saw in Hollis’s eyes, or with the fate of her friend, but that there was some language required here that he’d never learned.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“It’s a very old tactic,” said Meredith, “and particularly obvious with identical twins.” “Though new to their audience, and Bram’s,” said George, “who as you point out are thirteen years old.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Foley, he began to suspect, studying the mouth under the black rectangle, might be the kind of scary that was about meanness, rather than strength. Though he’d also seen the two coexist, more or less, in the same individual, and that hadn’t been good at all.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Keeping her mind off the basement as well, she wondered exactly when coffee had gone walkabout in France. When she’d first been here, drinking coffee hadn’t been a pedestrian activity. One either sat to do it, in cafés or restaurants, or stood, at bars or on railway platforms, and drank from sturdy vessels, china or glass, themselves made in France. Had Starbucks brought the takeaway cup? she wondered. She doubted it. They hadn’t really had the time. More likely McDonald’s.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Sufficiently perverse and titanic arseholes,” he said, “can become religious objects. Negative saints. People who dislike them, with sufficient purity and fervor, well, they do that. Spend their lives lighting candles. I don’t recommend it.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Everything I know about being a fashion model in the 21st Century I learned from Jenna Sauers’ wonderful Jezebel memoir, “I Am The Anonymous Model.” Meredith’s modeling career is based on it. Available with a quick Google.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“She got what I was trying to get away from. The seasons, the bullshit, the stuff that wore out, fell apart, wasn’t real. I’d been that girl, walking across Paris, to the next shoot, no money for a Métro card, and I’d imagined those shoes. And when you imagine something like that, you imagine a world. You imagine the world those shoes come from, and you wonder if they could happen here, in this world, the one with all the bullshit. And sometimes they can. For a season or two.”
― William Gibson, Zero History

“Addictions, he thought, turning right, toward Seven Dials’ name-sake obelisk, started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel had said, less intelligent than goldfish.”
― William Gibson, Zero History