Spook Country Quotes

“Secrets...are the very root of cool.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“The pop star, as we knew her" – and here he bowed slightly, in her direction – "was actually an artefact of preubiquitous media."
"Of -?"
"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."
"As opposed to?"
"Comprising it.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“No idea. None whatever. That’s exactly what makes it so interesting.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“The men in bars, who explain every dark secret of this world, Tito, have you noticed, no secret requires more than three drinks to explain. Who killed the Kennedys? Three drinks. America’s real motive in Iraq? Three drinks. The three-drink answers can never contain the truth. The”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“He wore shoes that made her think of old French priests, bicycling”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. VR was an even more specific way we had of telling us where we were going. Without scaring us too much, right? The locative, though, lots of us are already doing it. But you can’t just do the locative with your nervous system. One day, you will. We’ll have internalized the interface. It’ll have evolved to the point where we forget about it. Then you’ll just walk down the street…” He spread his arms, and grinned at her.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“What do we owe him, Uncle?” “He saw our way here. He honored his word.” Carlito rose as the train pulled into Fifty-ninth Street. One gloved hand rested for an instant on Tito’s shoulder. “Do well, nephew.” He turned and was gone. Tito glanced past boarding passengers, hoping to see Vianca still there, but she too was gone. He reached into his jacket’s side pocket, finding the Bulgarian’s singular, meticulously made weapon. It was folded loosely, within a fresh white cotton handkerchief from China, still stiff with sizing. On drawing it from your pocket, those around you might think you were about to blow your nose. Without looking, Tito knew that the cardboard cylinder of carefully milled salt filled the entirety of the very short barrel. He left it where it was. Now that the Bulgarian’s rubber gaskets had been replaced with silicone, an effective charge could be maintained for up to forty-eight hours. The salt, he wondered, was it Bulgarian? Where had those cartridges been made? In Sofia? In Moscow, perhaps? In London, where the Bulgarian was said to have worked before Tito’s grandfather had brought him to Cuba? Or in Havana, where he’d lived out his days? The train pulled away from Columbus Circle.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“It seemed to occupy its own reptilian delta of time, a dead-end continuum of watered drinks and low-level anxiety.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun’s inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn’t fired the gun since they’d been together. “What did you say?” “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable. “The fuck—” “If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.” Brown opened his mouth. Closed it. “It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.” There was a look on Brown’s face that Milgrim hadn’t seen there before. Now Brown tossed a fresh bubble-pack down on the bedspread. “Good night,” Milgrim heard himself say, still insulated by the silver membrane. Brown turned, walking silently back into his own room in his stocking feet, the partial pistol in his hand. Milgrim raised his right arm toward the ceiling, straight up,”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“The full-on Townsend-Moon hooter. She only ever found this problematic in males who hadn’t become pop musicians; it seemed, then, in some weirdly inverted way, affected. It looked, to her, as though they’d grown large noses in order to look like rock musicians. More weirdly, perhaps, they all tended—certified accountants, radiologists, or whatever—to the flopping forelock that had traditionally gone with it, back in Muswell Hill or Denmark Street. This, she’d once reasoned, must be due in one of two ways to hairdressers. Either they saw the rock mega-nose and dressed the hair above it out of a call to historical tradition, or they weighed the issue in some instinctive, deeply hairdresserly way, arriving at that massive slash and heft of eye-obscuring forelock through some simple sense of balance.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country