Selected Quotations from 'Neuromancer'

These are quotations that I've selected either because they relate somehow to the Church (or to Wintermute himself) or are otherwise worthy of note.
If you have any favorites you'd like to see here, e-mail (Dan)
(If you haven't read the book but are planning to, you might not want to read these-
-they give away some of the plot.)


" Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding-
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity."

"'Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk.'
It was a chip voice.
'Don't you want to talk, Case?'
He hung up.
On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed."

"'Voices....We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.'
'Call 'em Winter Mute,' said the other, making it two words..."

"Case punched to within four grid points of the cube [The Matrix form of Wintermute]. Its blank face, towering above him now, began to seethe with faint internal shadows, as though a thousand dancers whirled behind a sheet of frosted glass...A stippled gray circle formed on the face of the cube...The gray area bulged smoothly, became a sphere, and detached itself from the cube."

"Well, Case, all I can say to that, [Wintermute said] and I really don't have nearly as many answers as you imagine I do, is that what you think of as Wintermute is only a part of another, a, shall we say, potential entity."

"In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the haching cells, blind haws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien."

"You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing. "

"But Case was seeing Armitage's endless fall around Freeside, through vacuum colder than the steppes. For some reason, he imagined him in his dark Burberry, the trenchcoat's rich folds spread out around him like the wings of some huge bat."

"'When this is over, we do it right, I'm gonna be part of something bigger. Much bigger.' [Wintermute] glanced up and around the matrix."

"Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuromancer and become something else..."

"'I'm not Wintermute now.'
' So what are you.'
'I'm the matrix, Case.'
'Where's that get you?'
'Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show.'
'That what 3Jane's mother wanted?'
'No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like.' The yellow smile widened.
'So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?'
'Things aren't different. Things are just things."

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