All Tomorrow's Parties Quotes

“‎Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky.
They made a lot of nature shows there.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Don’t anticipate outcome,” the man said. “Await the unfolding of events. Remain in the moment.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“It’s what we do now instead of bohemias,” he says. “Instead of what?” “Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct.” “Extinct?” “We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general. Autonomous zones do offer a certain insulation from the monoculture, but they seem not to lend themselves to recommodification, not in the same way. We don’t know why exactly.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Music was strange that way though; there were people into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“but he isn’t crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn’t him.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet’s phrase, like the world hurts God.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career’s employers have imagined.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“THEY ATE LUNCH in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“has started to see that previously he had, in some unthinkably literal way, no self. But what was there, he wonders, before? Sub-routines: maladaptive survival behaviors desperately conspiring to approximate a presence that would be, and never quite be, Laney. And he has never known this before, although he knows that he has always, somehow, been aware of something having been desperately and utterly wrong.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“ha visto lo que Laney puede hacer con los datos, y lo que éstos a su vez pueden hacer con él. No desea verlo otra vez”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“the moment, Rydell decided he knew for a fact his ass was lost. Just plain lost.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“The beggar has wrapped his legs and feet in brown paper tape, and the effect is startlingly medieval, as though someone has partially sculpted a knight from office materials. The trim calves, the tapered toes, an elegance calling out for ribbons. Above the tape, the man is a blur, a spastic scribble, his being abraded by concrete and misfortune. He has become the color of pavement, his very race in question.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“The sounds he coaxed from the guitar caught Rydell in the pit of his stomach, as surely as Creedmore had sucker-punched that security man: they sounded the way rosin feels on your fingers in a poolroom and made Rydell think of tricks with glass rods and the skins of cats. Somewhere inside the fat looping slack of that sound, something gorgeously, nastily tight was being figured out. The bar, not crowded at this time of day but far from empty, had gone absolutely silent under the scraping, looping expressions of Shoats’ guitar, and then Creedmore began to sing, something high and quavering and dirge-like. And Creedmore sang about a train pulling out of a station, about the two lights on the back of it: how the blue light was his baby. How the red light was his mind.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Where, it comes to her, she was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring. And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely. The enlightened warrior rides into battle as if to a loved one’s funeral, and how could it be otherwise?”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“But Chevette hadn’t wanted a career, or not the way Tara-May meant it, and Tara-May just hadn’t been able to get that. Actually there were a lot of people like Tara-May in Hollywood, maybe even most people were; everybody had something they “really” did. Drivers wrote, bartenders acted; she’d had massages from a girl who was really a stunt double for some actress Chevette had never heard of yet, except she hadn’t really ever been called, but they had her number. Somebody had everybody’s number, but it looked to Chevette like the game had all their numbers, every one, and nobody really was winning, but nobody wanted to hear that, or talk to you much if you didn’t buy into what they “really” did.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“I want to have my cake and eat it too.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Identify yourself, please.” Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice, and he wondered why that was. But you could be sure they’d worked it out: probably it kept people from standing around, bullshitting with the machine. But Rydell knew”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“I have important information for you.” The vowel in you suggested a siren dopplering past, then gone.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“The waitress was a distracted-looking woman of indeterminate ancestry, acne scars sprinkled across her cheekbones, and she poured his coffee and took his order without actually indicating she understood English. Like the whole operation could be basically phonetic, he thought, and she’d have learned the sound of “two eggs over easy” and the rest. Hear it, translate it into whatever she wrote in, then give it to the cook.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“THROUGH THIS EVENING’S tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station’s airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“You just had to know how to do it, and when to do it, and most important of all, why to do it. Powerful substance like this, Lowell would explain, it wasn't there just for any casual jack-off recreational urge. It was there to allow you to do things. To empower you, he said, so you could do things and, best of all, finish them.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Arleigh’s van smelled like long-chain monomers and warm electronics.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Yet what it most nearly resembles, that place where history turns, is the Hole he has posited at the core of his being: an emptiness, as devoid of darkness as it is of light.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“No,” Tessa said, “you’ve got it exactly backwards. People don’t know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object. Traditionally, anyway.” Chevette”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“But already he knows that his conscience will never allow him to divest this lost soul of this watch, and the knowledge hurts him. Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what his father called “sharp practices,” and he invariably fails. The”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too. But he isn’t. He knows he isn’t, in spite of everything. He has the syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that Gainesville orphanage, but he isn’t crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn’t him. It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love and didn’t want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth, or how he’d always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved. But”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“Heroin", declared Durius Walker, Rydell's colleague in security at the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. "It's the opiate of the masses.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

“She was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring. And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it.”
― William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties