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Jane had said...that everybody adored marine antiques, especially people who had never been to sea.

Jane had said...that everybody adored marine antiques, especially people who had never been to sea.

Jane had said...that everybody adored marine antiques, especially people who had never been to sea.

Reading with my class this semester. That opening line is rightfully iconic. Really enjoying this so far.

"I didn't know it at the time, but all the guests were Satanists."

(Just kind of a funny sentence.)

Did not know that the Stone Pony used to be a disco club called the Magic Touch, nor that the adjoining beer garden was apparently a den of iniquity featuring bikers, palm readers and even "go-go girls." Interesting tidbits in this book, but they're making me wish I were actually reading a Hunter S. Thompson-style narrative that would bring all this history to life.

"I am not one woman, but many. Just as you are more than one man."
"Is that voodoo?"
"That's common sense."

"We skipped desert in favor of brandy and cigars." Sounds good to me.

The waiter set our drinks on the table with less intrusion than a passing shadow.

The first time I met Fuck-Nose, Chicago's stage manager, he jumped onto my trailer from the floor of the Philadelphia Spectrum, looked around, didn't tell me who he was, didn't ask who I was, didn't shake my hand, and just said, "I hate people."

Last but not least, I believe we bonded through the rejuvenating rush one gets from operating outside the law.

"Shinjuku police had arrested the owner of a club in Kabukicho known as The Mature Hot Wives Party Palace for managing prostitutes."

And that must have taken some real detective work...

I like how everyone in the Japanese underworld seems to have a nickname. The Cat. The Cobra. I wish people called me The Cat.

"]Montreal] was, and still is to my way of thinking, one of the four primary North American portals to the underworld, the others being San Francisco, Vegas and New Orleans."

Only a few chapters in, and I've already laughed out loud multiple times. Raw and very funny tales from the 70s rock-n'-roll road.

Saitama. A place considered so uncool by urban Japanese that it had spawned its own adjective, dasai, meaning "not hip, boring, unfashionable."

In other words, I'd been assigned to the New Jersey of Japan.

"Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf...my own hero principally because he stands for all the most fucked up things that I could ever possibly conceive of. Which probably only shows the limits of my imagination."

Opened this up on a whim yesterday to one of the chapters about Lou Reed, and...yowza, this cat can write! Whether any of his ravings would help you in the slightest bit to determine whether you might like the album he's talking about seems kind of beside the point.

He was watching a point of reflected light slide along the distant structure, a movement like osmosis or the sequential contraction of some sea creature's palps...he closed his eyes, not wanting to see the new buildings. But they were still there, in the darkness and the light behind his lids. They slid apart, deliquesced, and trickled away, down into the mazes of an older city. He slid down with them.

Might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm digging this a little more than what I've read of Claremont's run. Maybe 90s X-Men is more my speed.

This novel is 30 years old. It's probably the most common compliment to pay Gibson, but it's uncanny how similar the world of the novel feels to the one we live in today. Beyond that, this is so far easily the most fun I've had with one of his books.

"The climate," I said.
"The climate."
"The asteroid," I said.
"The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?"
"Famine, worldwide."
"Famine," he said. "What else?"
"Give me a minute."
"Never mind. Because this isn't interesting to me. I have no use for this. We need to think beyond this."
I didn't want him to stop. We sat drinking quietly and I tried to think of further workable prospects for the end of human life on earth.

The guard faced the edge of the screen but was looking nowhere, looking at whatever museum guards look at when a room stands empty.

"It's not that guy, is it?" Mary gestured with her thumb to the patrol car behind them.

"No," Sunny said. "It's somebody else. But it's over. I'm not going to see him again."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"Well, then you will."

"I'm so used to that look-alike crap that I was starting to think speed tasted like coffee."