Burning Chrome Quotes

“Hell of a world we live in, huh? (...) But it could be worse, huh?"
"That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.”
― Bruce Sterling, Burning Chrome

“It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Yeah, it's so popular it's almost legal. The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner.

Hang-gliding," I said, "accident."

Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser."

I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did.

I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.

I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler' s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn't love money, in and of itself , not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing.

So he made do with women.

When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone else's credit clicks into your own account.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s just no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“if poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“i put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.
The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.
Not the Edge lecture again, I said.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“...I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Science fiction tends to behave like a species of history pointing in the opposite direction, up the timeline rather than back. But you can’t draw imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Coretti didn’t know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease. His ex-wife told him he dressed like a Martian; that he didn’t look as though he belonged anywhere in the city. He hadn’t liked her saying that, because it was true.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“one can’t really enjoy what science fiction does without being able to recognize the point at which the imaginary lifts off from the known.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“subgenres are products of the writers’ urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“It's the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles,”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“La matriz se pliega a mi alrededor como un truco de origami”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“nothing acquires quite as rapid or peculiar a patina of age as an imaginary future.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“hoi polloi.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Navy stuff,” she said, and her grin gleamed in the shadows. “Navy stuff. I got a friend down here who was in the navy, name’s Jones. I think you’d better meet him. He’s a junkie, though. So we’ll have to take him something.” “A junkie?” “A dolphin.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“What they don’t tell you is that it’s impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified .”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“there was coffee. Life would go on.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way. And because I knew she’d phone me, in the morning.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“he was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome