Virtual Light Quotes

“How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you'd ever had them. (...) You didn't wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'

Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'

Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'

Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'

Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Lady,' Rydell said carefully, 'I think you're crazier than a sack full of assholes.'
Her eyebrows shot up. 'There,' she said.
'There what?'
'Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Berry,” Pursley said, “you’re in trouble, son. A cop. And an honest one. In trouble. In deep, spectacular, and, please, I have to say this, clearly heroic shit.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“They'd run all these tests on him and decided he wasn't racist. He wasn't, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn't see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn't be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we'd all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the millennium’s turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“The dream recedes, but leaves a residue.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Warbaby wiped the glasses again and put them back on. They were clear now. “There are drivers in the frames and lenses. They affect the nerves directly.” “It’s a virtual light display,” Freddie said, eager to change the subject. “Anything can be digitized, you can see it there.” “Telepresence,” Rydell said. “Naw,” Freddie said, “that’s light. That’s photons coming out and hitting on your eye. This doesn’t work like that. Mr. Warbaby walks around and looks at stuff, he can see the data-feed at the same time. You put those glasses on a man doesn’t have eyes, optic nerve’s okay, he can see the input. That’s why they built the first ones. For blind people.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“But”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Eso es. Gente lista. No tienen ejército, ni armada, ni fuerza aérea; son neutrales. Y se ocupan de los datos de todos.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“He’d been dreaming about Mrs. Armbruster’s class, fifth grade at Oliver North Elementary. They were about to be let out because LearningNet said there was too much Kansas City flu around to keep the kids in Virginia and Tennessee in school that week. They were all wearing these molded white paper masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning. Mrs. Armbruster had just explained the meaning of the word pandemic.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“You can always sell tools,” Skinner had mused, perhaps to Yamazaki, perhaps to himself. “Somebody’ll always buy ’em. But then you always need ’em again, exactly the one you sold.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“As she'd gotten stronger, and her new hair grew in, she'd started ranging farther from the room on top of the tower. Not into either city, at first, though she'd walked over to Oakland a couple of times, over the cantilever, and looked out at it. Things felt different over there, though she was never sure why. But where she felt best was on the suspension bridge, all wrapped in it, all the people hanging and hustling and doing what they did, and the way the whole thing grew a little, changed a little, every day. There wasn't anything like that, not that she knew of, not up in Oregon.

At first she didn't even know that it made her feel good; it was just this weird thing, maybe the fever had left her a little crazy, but one day she'd decided she was just happy, a little happy, and she'd have to get used to it.

But it turned out you could be sort of happy and restless at the same time, so she started keeping back a little of Skinner's junk-money to use to explore the city. And that was plenty to do, for a while. She found Haight Street and walked it all the way to the wall around Skywalker, with the Temple of Doom and everything sticking up in there, but she didn't try to go in. There was this long skinny park that led up to it, called the Panhandle, and that was still public. Way too public, she thought, with people, mostly old or anyway looking that way, stretched out side by side, wrapped in silvery plastic to keep the rays off, this crinkly stuff that glittered like those Elvis suits in a video they'd showed them sometimes, up in Beaverton. It kind of made her think of maggots, like if somebody rolled each one up in its own little piece of foil. They had a way of moving like that, just a little bit, and it creeped her out.

The Haight sort of creeped her out, too, even though there were stretches that felt almost like you were on the bridge, nobody normal in sight and people doing things right out in public, like the cops were never going to come at all. But she wasn't ever scared, on the bridge, maybe because there were always people around she knew, people who lived there and knew Skinner. But she liked looking around the Haight because there were a lot of little shops, a lot of places that sold cheap food. She knew this bagel place where you could buy them a day old, and Skinner said they were better that way anyway. He said fresh bagels were the next thing to poison, like they'd plug you up or something. He had a lot of ideas like that. Most of the shops, she could actually go into, if she was quiet and smiled a little and kept her hands in her pockets.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“They were about to be let out because LearningNet said there was too much Kansas City flu around to keep the kids in Virginia and Tennessee in school that week. They were all wearing these molded white paper masks the nurses had left on their seats that morning.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“How she felt, now, was just the way she’d felt that day she’d come back to the trailer and found her mother all packed up and gone. No message there but a can of ravioli in a pot on the stove, with the can-opener propped up beside it. She hadn’t eaten that ravioli and she hadn’t eaten any since and she knew she never would.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Rain-silvered plywood,”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“He drinks the vodka. He watches television. And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“None of their voices were real, even; it was all digital stuff. God-eater could just as well be a woman, or three different people, or all three of the ones he’d seen there might’ve been just one person.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“His hand came up, forefinger flicking the corroded ball-chain that dangled from the zip-tab at the neck of Skinner’s jacket. “Those VL glasses. Virtual light.” She’d heard of it, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “They expensive, Sammy Sal?” “Shit, yes. ’Bout as much as a Japanese car. Not all that much more, though. Got these little EMP-drivers around the lenses, work your optic nerves direct. Friend of mine, he’d bring a pair home from the office where he worked. Landscape architects. Put ’em on, you go out walking, everything looks normal, but every plant you see, every tree, there’s this little label hanging there, what its name is, Latin under that …”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last week’s People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyper-evolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armored tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas-filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city, then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain glinted on the street-car tracks, how a secretary’s mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Ain’t all that simple,” he said. “It’s everything I been brought up to be. Can’t all be bullshit, can it?” Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. “Naw,” he said, “I guess it wouldn’t have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it’s just—” “What they bring you all up to be, Berry?” Rydell had to think about it. “Republican,” he said, finally.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“Stormin’,” he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic.”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light

“They had remained silent during the trial, their leader stating only that the disease was God’s vengeance on sinners and the unclean. Lean men with shaven heads and blank, implacable eyes, they were God’s gunmen, and would stare, as such, from all the tapes of history, forever. But”
― William Gibson, Virtual Light