Cyberpunk V Quotes

#1. The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.

Douglas Rushkoff

#2. There are no limits, only plateaus.

Sam A. Patel

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

Tade Thompson

#4. A washing machine repairman dying of laryngeal cancer had only one recurring thought: There is no excuse for making an angel cry.

Tade Thompson

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

Angelo Tsanatelis

#6. A Dick and Jane story written in blood and battered bone.

See Spot.

See Spot run.

See Spot run from a gaping chest wound.

Run Spot run.

See Detective smear Spot into a baggy for DNA testing.

J.E. Mac

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

Tade Thompson

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

Tade Thompson

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

Neal Stephenson

#10. Funny how they're corpses if you didn't know them, but bodies if you did.

Jason Heller

#11. Destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

William Gibson

#12. That's the point of Zeno's Paradox, isn't it? Whatever your goal, you're never more than halfway there.

Sam A. Patel

#13. Their detectors, like everything else about them and their small, shrinking world, were always looking for the wrong weapons, Sem thought as he began to sharpen his pencil.

Jason Heller

#14. ...the bioidentical cortex chip that will be implanted subcutaneously on the inside of your forearm. It is a proprietary biocircuit developed in our labs specifically for this purpose, and it is unlike any other in the world.

Sam A. Patel

#15. The mind has doors...even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.

Raphael Carter

#16. 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

James Patrick Kelly

#17. I will dive to find Rosalie. She is out there, floating for me if I can only swim long enough, climbing up through silent silver bubbles up and up and free.

Jason Heller

#18. I first conceived of my far-future setting 'Punktown' in 1980, and though it contains 'punk' in its name, the term 'cyberpunk' hadn't been coined yet. I took my inspiration strictly from punk music.

Jeffrey Thomas

#19. She glimpsed the sexless mounds between their legs and shuddered. For some reason, she found their lack of genitals uncannily obscene, an indignity, a piece of humanity they had been denied.

Jason Heller

#20. As far as I know Misha wrote the first cyberpunk poetry.

John Shirley

#21. I go outside, bundled against the wind from the east. I wander the streets of my past, waiting for one more dawn.

Jason Heller

#22. The arm that carries the data. That's your wing.

Sam A. Patel

#23. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer.

Tade Thompson

#24. Can you look at this brilliant wound?

Keishi Ando

#25. Cyberpunk was really a reaction against old boy sci-fi which was about white guys in space who would come up with some kind of technological thing.

Pat Cadigan

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

William Gibson

#27. Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.

Paul Di Filippo

#28. The traceur doesn't knock an obstacle out of the way unless it's absolutely necessary. He meanders his way past it. Over. Under. Through. Around. He gets past not by moving the obstacle but by moving himself. That is parkour, and working this job I use every technique I know just to get it done.

Sam A. Patel

#29. This is a psychofield, a thoughtspace, essentially unstable. While most people conceptualise thinking as this straightforward linear thing, I see ideas spreading out into alternatives before one is selected. In this place every notion can potentially become reality.

Tade Thompson

#30. It was not until the appearance of cyberpunk in the 1980s that SF began to grapple in a broadly meaningful way with the reality of computers as something other than giant mainframes tended by crewcut IBM nerds.

Paul Di Filippo