The Peripheral Quotes

“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.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.” “You”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.” “I’ve”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Fuck it. Just fuck it.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“heard”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“You're from the future, Mr Netherton?"
"Not exactly," he said. "I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future. Here.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Opportunities to do very badly were manifold. You avoided them. The major part in any success.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Algorithms are called the aunties. They’re self-organising and so nobody fully understands them.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“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. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Those fuckers,” Janice said, meaning the football players, “they get me doing hate Kegels.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Totally looks like somebody,” she said. It really did. It was the opposite of something they’d build to meet some general idea of beauty. And if she understood correctly, nobody knew who it looked like. It was like the pictures in a box at a yard sale, nobody remembering who those people were, or even whose family, let alone how they came to be there. It gave her a sense of things falling, down some hole that had no bottom. Whole worlds falling, and maybe hers too, and it made her want to phone Janice, who was out at the house, and see how her mother was doing.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Something that induced a dissociative state. It was difficult to complain about a dissociative state.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral