The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

The street finds its own uses for things.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.

Secrets...are the very root of cool.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void...

Time is money, but also money is money.

The present tense made him nervous.

Things aren't different. Things are things.

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

Wonderful , the Flatline said, I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.

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.

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.

Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.

My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar- winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.