Pattern Recognition Quotes

“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.
An experience outside culture.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“a teoria de jet lag de Damien está correta: que sua alma mortal ficou a léguas de distância e está sendo rebobinada por algum cordão umbilical fantasma seguindo a trilha já desaparecida do avião que a levou até ali, a centenas de milhares de pés de altura sobre o Atlântico.”
― William Gibson, Reconhecimento de Padrões (Trilogia Blue Ant Livro 1)

“She walks on, phone in hand, until she finds a sort of thick, truncated granite bollard thrust up from the pavement.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn’t right. However odd things seem, mustn’t it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one’s own, and no one else’s?”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“We have no future because our present is too volatile.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“By the time they arrive at Notting Hill, whatever rogue aspect of personality has been driving this morning’s expedition seems to have decamped, leaving her feeling purposeless and confused.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“He said they’d been done in by the Beatles, so the food riots hadn’t had to happen. The Beatles and losing their own Vietnam.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“They don’t buy the product: They recycle the information. They use it to try to impress the next person they meet.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Stonestreet producing a pack of cigarettes called Silk Cut, which Cayce, never a smoker, thinks of as somehow being the British equivalent of the Japanese Mild Seven. Two default brands of creatives.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“She’s here on Blue Ant’s ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“The tabloid doesn’t go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“The switch on Damien’s Italian floor lamp feels alien: a different click, designed to hold back a different voltage,”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep. Gropes for her clothes. A small boy’s black Fruit Of The Loom T-shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501’s, every trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the Village, a week ago.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Bigend, a formidable practitioner of the other side of this dance, seems genuinely incapable of imagining that others wouldn't want to do whatever it is that he wants them to. Margot had cited this as both the most problematic and, she admitted, most effective aspect of his sexuality: He approached every partner as though they already had slept together. Just as, Cayce was now finding, in business, every Bigend deal was treated as a done deal, signed and sealed. If you hadn't signed with Bigend, he made you feel as though you had, but somehow had forgotten that you had.
There was something amorphous, froglike, about his will: It spread out around you, tenuous, almost invisible; you found yourself moving, mysteriously, in directions other than your own.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Apophenia,”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Is that why he didn’t stay?” “No. He left because I no longer wanted to be in partnership with him.” “You didn’t? I mean, you don’t?” “No.” “Why?” “Because he pretends to be better at what he does than he is. I prefer people who are better at what they do than they think they are.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Ngemi creaks, beside her. “Was he in a better mood, then?” he asks. “He showed me his gun.” “This is England, girl,” Ngemi says. “People don’t have guns.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“She is hyper-specialized, a freelancer, someone contracted to do a very specific job. She has seldom had a salary. She is entirely a creature of fees, adamantly short-term, no managerial skills whatever”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Do we have a past, then?” Stonestreet asks. “History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,” Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. “Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“It is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Damien maintains, half-seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge. She wonders why she bought it. The tabloid doesn’t go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves,”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition