Cyberpunk Quotes

Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).

That’s sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real.” Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. “Real love, real friends, real body parts…

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

It has no eyes. Zack, why doesn’t it have any eyes? 

Killed by our collective blindness. Not a great epitaph.

Beef had hit $300 a kilo. Not that he could recall the last time he’d tasted real beef.

Your life is a beer glass Micah, but you want champagne

They must train you pretty good not to react to shit like that. Must take stuff out of you.” Vince’s eyes intensified then broke her gaze. ‘Actually, it’s more like they put stuff in.

People rarely search for bodies in ceilings…

Vasquez faced off Vince. “We’ll meet in hell for sure.” Vince didn’t blink. “I have a condo there waiting for me. You’re welcome for tea. Now, give the order, Colonel.

Take it from me, kid, sometimes it’s okay to run. You run as fast as you damn well can.

Perhaps Mozart’s Requiem would be fitting music for the end of the world. She began to hum Dies Irae, recalling its first performance in Vienna.

He wondered what his father had been thinking in those last final moments as he was slipping away, whether the heroism, the honour, the war, or maybe, just maybe, the smaller people in his life, his family.

Overall, she seemed to be going for a sort of mid-’80s postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look. And it was working for me, in a big way. In a word: hot.

She stared at her console, wanting to punch it. Her dream, running to save her life, to save everything, was all going to come true down on the planet’s surface. And when it did, she knew this time she wasn’t going to wake up.

I had a close encounter with an alien last week. He returned to visit us and was amazed we were still here.

Pythagoras has had me going round in circles for years.” ― Anthony Merrydew

Science Fiction, is the last great escape.

The demise of the human race rests mainly on the shoulders of stupidity, and the abuse of power in the hands of those we have elected.

Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.

He turns off the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

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.

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again.

What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?

Only the framing material," Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God.

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

The Haunting was the feeling you got sometimes, in the Vurt, the real world calling you home. There's more to life than this. This is just a game.

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2?

He got one finger cut off when he was young... The cafe paid for a replacement, put some nano-plastic in there. The kid got hooked. It happens. You get some plastic in you, you just want some more...Some more of that strength. Because that's what it is. Strength. The Strength to persist.

Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

You can't hack your destiny, brute force...you need a back door, a side channel into Life.

We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortunate on. Whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals. Instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart. Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped. But villains are oversimplifications.

It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence.

The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal. Quellcrist Falconer Things I Should Have Learned by Now, Volume II

თუ ცეკვა ჭეშმარიტია, ის აუცილებლად რევოლუციით მთავრდება, თუ არა და დილისკენ ადამიანები ტოვებენ კლუბებს მწარე ატხადნიაკით და მელანქოლიით იმის გამო, რომ რევოლუცია ისევ არ შედგა.

Our cyberworld and cyberspace are infested with so many cyberscoundrels, cybercriminals, cybersluts and cyberpunks - that is virtually impossible for the cybercops (cyberpolice) to catch or stop them using known cybertechniques and save the cyberphobia of millions of cybernauts, many of whom are cyberholics.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

...destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

He felt the city reach out and embrace him with its vast indifference.

Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

I think they are a better race than humans ever were.

Slums are always a marvel; how human desperation can seem to warp the very laws of physics.

the failure of language.” “It’s a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.

He is an electric ghost painted in the colours of a dead moment.

Oyin Da’s mind is as elegant as a French horn, thoughts moving in whorls and evoking fresh mint leaves.

No good thing renders its possessor happy, unless his mind is reconciled to the possibility of loss.

The Yoruba say ‘o d’oju ala’ when someone dies. I will see you in dreams.

This city runs over with ghosts and neon gods.

The whole place was a rather chaotic jumble of science-fantasy and cyberpunk.  The sort of place where the ideas of a lot of really bad authors came together, or perhaps drunken game designers.

Do you remember, Abelard... Once I told you that ecstasy was better than being God." "I remember." "I was wrong, darling. Being God is better.

Those who wake...do not regret the dream.

THIS REVOLUTION IS FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY.

It is a certainty, not just a conviction, the way believing in God is a conviction, but believing in gravity is a certainty.

Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.

Вероятно човек може да мисли като примат, но приматът не може да мисли като човек.

To watch me is to eat glass. Can't you feel me glittering in your stomach?

This law is immutable. The user always pays.

...memories are not just for the individual. They make up our collective consciousness. They are a common resource that teaches us who we are and how to be.

The beautiful creatures are often the most dangerous," she murmured.

Live your life. Don’t subscribe to other people’s ideals because this is what happens. One way or another, it will crush you.

How long does it take for two armies to destroy each other when one has an abundance of bodies and the other an abundance of bullets?

That's how we should celebrate all birthdays... with an ass-kicking.

How can it be hard and easy at the same time?” asked Omar. “It's like a really tall wall,” said Anja. “It might be hard to climb, but there's no flying crocodiles to fight off while you do it.

What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash

America has fallen and I don't feel so good myself.

You can’t scrub everything,” says Lorenzo. “Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.

Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed.

Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What’s truer than that...

Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.

I’d been an outcast my entire life. Growing up with technophobe parents in the dawn of a Cyborg Age did that to a person.

What I need I carry in my head. Everything in that machine came from me. My fat burned into knowledge. My calories pedaled into data analysis" -- The Calorie Man

I can’t,’ I say. Her mind closes like a shutter, with finality. I wish, at that moment, that I had said something else.

Technology isn't rational; with luck, it's a runaway horse, foaming at the mouth, ready to throw itself off a cliff in desperation. Our problem is that culture's tied to that horse.

Life seemed ideal to him right then, and he was happy for the first time in a long time, and it felt like the sun was shining from his heart." - from the novel Brainjob by David Sloma.

The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past. It certainly isn’t a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint.

She was everywhere. She was screaming in her tortured body. She was watching from cameras in every room. She was the false weather system and the storage devices. She was the gate keeper, throwing six shirts over her swan-brothers necks...opening six doors for her brothers to step through as young men, though their bodies were long gone, used up by the organ banks of the upper castes. A Lamentation of Swans

2 SECONDS He was on her in an instant to brace her against the wall. She kicked and clawed at her unseen attacker, skin and irises ablaze in caustic gold. She fired anew, and the point-blank shot broke through his defenses, grazing his hip. He ignored the harsh sting to bring his Daemon up between them. 1 SECOND

Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over a business card that read YOUR OWN PERSONAL TRANSHUMAN SECURITY WHORE! STERILIZED INNARDS! ACCEPTS ALL CREDIT CARDS to a large man who had trained attack cancers on his face and possessed seventy-five indentured Komodo Dragons instead of legs. And they had sex. Right in front of me. And six of the Komodo Dragons spat napalm on my new shoes.

Maybe that was why it was almost always the underclasses, the women, the people of color, the gay people, the ones who were already stigmatized as being vulnerable, availble, trapped by the body, who took the risk of the wire.

However objective one's analytical approach may seem, [Some dude] argues, we must recognize the myth of objectivity as another rhetoric, another metadiscourse fashioning our sense of 'reality.' Although avant-gardism has long been believed to be a metafictional rhetoric displacing reality, we must not forget that it is a framework of reality that has been constructed rhetorically--whether its rhetoric is ontological or consumerist or creative-masochistic.

Alex thrust her hand and half her arm into the labyrinth of light. Her stare blanked, and in the halo of the matrix her eyes and glyphs blazed so radiantly she looked as if she were being consumed by a primordial fire. “She just stuck her hand into Machim Command’s central server matrix!” Caleb smiled, watching on in blatant awe. “She does that.

The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.

Many live where they must, not where they choose, yet still endeavor to form lifestyle enclaves to whatever degree they are able. Simlarly, people now live within what we might call "cultural enclaves." Individuals with very different meaning systems - from cyberpunks to fundamentalist Muslims - can create and receive their own distinct cultural objects and confine their interactions to others who share their meaning systems. These interacting cultural groups may be labeled communities, and they may and do cross political and geographical boundaries, but they are built around sameness rather than around diversity. Their tendency is not to increase tolerance - the stated goal of multiculturalism - but to diminish it.

I think we're moving toward a world where all the consumers under a certain age will probably tend to identify more with their consumer status or with the products they consume then they would with ... any sort of antiquated notion of nationality.

Children are turning themselves into monsters and, quite frankly, it is your fault. You initiated the creation of this technology, then you allowed it to slip through your fingers.” Miriam’s jaw tightened. “I disagree, but now is the least optimal time imaginable for assigning blame. People are dying, and I will not stand around debating semantics with you while they are.

If you read no other work of what’s known as “cyberpunk” (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including “cyberpunk” itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.

Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope.” He points at the images. “This doesn’t feel like hope.

As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area. Lowbeer did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan.

You look like you’ve been on a month-long bender. Have you?” “No, Ken, I have not. I’ve just had a long week.” Walked the streets of a city bathed in blood and stood amid a hundred thousand corpses. Negotiated a three-way peace treaty among opposing factions of a warring alien species who’d previously held me captive. Bullied the Metigen leadership into doing my bidding. Found out we’re not the real humans, and the real humans are currently enslaving the real universe. Oh, and I think I’m addicted to my ship. How was your week? “Nothing a shower and some food won’t fix.

And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here’s how he once explained the omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time … there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.

Perhaps that's what the symbol means. What's the point of anarchy when the society you live in can shove you into a box no matter how hard you rebel? He can't help but think that's why the system evolved. To contain the uncontainable. Limit the prospects of those with limitless capacity for thought, creativity and analysis.

Buckminster Fuller said don’t try to change human behavior. It’s s a waste of time. Evolution doesn’t mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn’t develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.

When our decision-making is nurtured by corporate algorithm, when so many of our experiences are their simulations of experience, when we’ve outsourced our memories to be stored and filed away, by them. When our every moment is sampled, deconstructed, and built back into Trojans—advertising, architecture, news reports—that reformat our lives. How can we exist, then, when we’re someone else’s dream? They create these cities, Jack, and cities are huge external memory devices. But the memories are not ours, always those of others.

..you can't just break through a person's defenses like thatl the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.