Best 25 quotes of Jason Heller on MyQuotes

And this is the end of Elaine Stainless, it seems. I thought I was helping those I’d harmed before, somehow—that I was making amends. I still think that now, if I’m honest. It’s not like there’s anything else I can do. Your backstory always gets you in the end.

As each story for Cyber World popped up in my inbox, my confusion about how I defined cyberpunk grew. And I loved that feeling. Left to define the term “Cyber World” as they saw fit (or gloriously unfit), the authors formed a vast unconscious collective that redefined cyber-something-or-other for the current millennium. A network, you might even say. I don’t say that flippantly. Cyberpunk—or should we just start saying “cyberfiction”?—must must continually plug back into itself, challenge itself, consume itself, and reinvent itself if it hopes to survive and remain relevant.

Everywhere they touched, my skin responded. It sent signals to the receiver, to the synth, to the amp, and the sounds were broadcast over the PA. I’d set it to translate this first song into a single key, so the notes built into chords, then broke apart. I had ways to distort, to sustain, to make a note tremble as if it were bowed. It was me: I was playing me; they were playing me. I was the instrument, the conduit, the transmutation of loss into elegy, song into prayer, my own prayers into notes, notes into song. Body and music, fingers and hands, they drew me out.

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

Glittering news chips in men’s sideburns and women with braided microfilament glo-strands stepping around me, laughing with silver lipsticks. Kaleidoscope streets: lights and traffic and dust and coal diesel exhaust. Muddy and wet.

...Heard the rushing wind, saw through his tears: red and blue flaring light, and then he shut up and looked for it but found nothing.

He kissed the tip of my finger, and I smiled at this. I would not be able to heal him, but he would not hate me for failing. That would be enough for both of us.

her searches told her all mothers felt this way, at one time or another. There always came a day—no matter how hard one tried, no matter how tightly one locked the door and barred the windows—when the outside world would come creeping in. When your baby’s head would turn away from the glowing hearth of home and toward the glitter of false promises.

I blinked, and the world exploded with data. Images, scanned documents and photographs, a whirlwind of numbers, under-the-table deals, and whispered words.

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

It wasn’t until the first of us began killing ourselves in unusual ways—tearing off our own faces, gnawing off our own limbs—that the government took notice. But they waited until we started killing the oligarchs who created us before they acted. Typical.

It was true. Nothing was ever lost. And nothing was ever forgotten, no matter how painful. The city was like a heart that way. She had four chambers, too. She had arteries that led in and out. She kept things moving. She kept the oxygen flowing in and out, in and out, clean for dirty, dirty for clean, the filthy midnight whispers for the purest morning prayers

I unfolded the vast plains of him, frozen with loss and yet…pure like a clear spring. I drank him in, letting the cold of him burn me. With each wave of pleasure I fell deeper and deeper into him until I could no longer tell when he ended and I began. Until at his centre, I found her.

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.

Maybe we should all find one,” I say. Or maybe, just for once, I should wait for someone to find me first.

My nerves still spark like ricocheting tracer bullets.

One of the things I like about Cyber World is that it shows cyberpunk has left its heteronormative boy’s club roots behind in the dust.

see, when I’m not paying attention to my barriers, I can glimpse other people’s thoughts. I catch them like lingering aftertastes or smells they leave in their wake: bitter envy, coppery anger, sour regret, the foul miasma of malice and cruelty.

She blew a light and watched a fire start. They would never leave her, now. I have no mouth, the city thought as she went to sleep, but I could kiss you.

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.

That would prove a recurring trait in him—the need to cover up his inadequacies with small lies and slight exaggerations. To pretend knowledge he didn’t have. I forgave him this flaw for I knew what it hid; I could feel his need like a pleasantly raw wound in my mouth, and I could not help but savour it.

The electro-cauterizer sliced through the wires behind my cybernetic eye, and as the world went black, so did a large portion of my memory.

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.

Today we no longer fear technology. It’s no longer a question of assimilation. What remains to be seen is what we are about to become.

You could love someone so strongly, for so long, and still forget—until the memories returned.