Pat Cadigan > Quotes

“Retiring young isn't for everybody, even if you think it is. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
― Pat Cadigan

“If you can’t fuck it and it doesn’t dance, eat it or throw it away.”
― Pat Cadigan

“Don’t talk to yourself in such a way that if you did so to a friend, it would end your friendship. If you had a friend dealing with the same things, you wouldn’t berate that person, say, ‘You’re not working hard enough,’ ‘You suck,’ or ‘You’re not as good as [whomever].’ You’d offer your friend encouragement, you’d try to point out all the things your friend did right, and how much progress your friend had made.
You should do no less for yourself.

Be very careful how you talk to yourself. Because you are listening.”
― Pat Cadigan

“Because if you didn’t speak your truth, there was always something that would speak it for you that much louder.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“We’re looking for places that aren’t on a map. If we put them on one, then anybody could find them.”
― Pat Cadigan, Chalk

“He was smiling. It was one of those sincere smiles grown-ups give kids when they’re trying to get them in arm’s reach for something bad. Doctors smile that way right before they give you a shot; teachers look the same just before they tell you they found out what you did. The Big Bad Wolf probably smiled at Red Riding Hood like that when he was pretending to be her grandma. Despite all my mother’s flaws including her mean streak, I never once saw that travesty of an expression on her face.”
― Pat Cadigan, Chalk

“Fly Heisenberg Airlines – we don’t know where we are, but we’re making damned good time.”
― Pat Cadigan

“Knowledge is power. But power corrupts. Which means the Age of Fast Information is an extremely corrupt age in which to live.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“You mention freedom of choice,’ she said. ‘However, we all know that often freedom of choice is a fantasy.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“if you didn’t speak your truth, there was always something that would speak it for you that much louder.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“Every technology has its original sin.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“Gator lifted the needle and dabbed at the decorated flesh, frowning. The cases on the Mimosa generally had terrible skin, but they were docile enough to make a good filing system, considering you could usually find them where you left them – they didn’t move around much on their own, and unlike other kinds of hardcopy, they seldom got stolen.”
― Pat Cadigan

“The universe doesn't know good or bad, only less or more.”
― Pat Cadigan, Angel

“Truth and information are not the same thing! And neither are reality and state of existence!”
― Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers

“TV and more TV. It looks like something out of an old movie," Sam said. “Forty, fifty years ago, they were always dragging out the TV screens when they wanted to show what the glorious future would look like. As if the future was just going to be more TV.”

“And, as it turned out, it is,” Rosa said.”
― Pat Cadigan

“Lobby for Decency Declares Brain an Erogenous Zone, Demands Mandatory Hatting.”
― Pat Cadigan

“It bothers me that I can’t press a button and check on the rest of the world, or at least the small parts of it that I’m interested in. I’m not the only one. You haven’t been able to walk around and see it, dear, but the irritability threshold around here is lower than it used to be. We’re not in our natural habitat anymore. We’ve become denizens of the net. Homo datum.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“Information can neither be created nor destroyed – it’s accessible or it’s inaccessible, but it is. If you have known it, and you can find the tiniest remnant of association, then you will know it again.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“Great people leave their marks. Everyone else is left with marks.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“you work for a large corporation, they’ll expect you to believe all kinds of stupid shit.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“Some things happened and some other things didn’t, and at one point I found I’d gone to a place where I married Jascha. Pyotr Frankis had been right: life was funny. It was also reasonably good and so was the relationship. And after the divorce, I got a job.”
― Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers

“[Gina] I got them Bad Old Cosmic C-Word Blues Again.
[Mark] What does ‘c-word’ mean?
[Gina] It means continuing to believe even when you don’t feel it. Not letting go even when you can’t find squat to hold onto. Going all the way from the beginning to the end.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“He’d thought at first that the solitude might make him strange, and then he’d asked himself just how much stranger did he think he could get, and after that he never gave it another thought.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“Today’s hard news stories were yesterday’s dystopian SF. Rereading”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“We tried baby oil but we kept running out of babies.”
― Pat Cadigan, Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson

“It’s go time,” he said, his voice filtered over the comm. “You know what ‘go’ means, right?” His nametag said Skyre. He winked at Tully, then turned to look behind them. Tully followed his gaze to see a cherry picker rolling toward them. Please keep me safe, Tully begged Skyre silently, even if I mispronounce your name.”
― Pat Cadigan, Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson

“Even the small victories count, Marine. Apone grinned at him in his mind’s eye. Every meal a banquet, every paycheck a fortune, remember?”
― Pat Cadigan, Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson

“Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again. You’d only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn’t know the difference.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners

“No one had ever told them that in this life everyone was fair game, and now it was their turn. It wasn’t their fault, there was nothing wrong with them—it was the universe that was fucked up.”
― Pat Cadigan, Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson

“Everything changed for the machines.”
― Pat Cadigan, Synners