Pat Cadigan

I'm old enough to remember when the polio vaccine was still new. Also, it hadn't been that long since most people who caught pneumonia died from it. These medical breakthroughs were practically miracles.

— Pat Cadigan

If you’re really going to die on me, you could at least rub my neck before you go.

— Pat Cadigan

“‘Truth is cheap, but information costs.’ I can’t remember who said that.”“Aren’t they all?” Sam asked him.

— Pat Cadigan

Keep your best whiskey in a bottle marked ‘mouthwash.’

— Pat Cadigan

The authenticity may have been dubious, but the excitement had been real.

— Pat Cadigan

The Beater has still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don’t slow down, we’re gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn’t happened that way. So they’d all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old—hell, not even growing up.

— Pat Cadigan

Nothing stays the same, Gina, nothing works forever. If I don’t like it, that’s too bad. If you don’t like it, that’s still too bad.

— Pat Cadigan

It was a lonely thing. There was no way to be sure if it meant the same thing to both of you. He’d forgotten that part of making love, how you couldn’t assume that intent was as joined as bodies were.

— Pat Cadigan

Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way.

— Pat Cadigan

The only place to go now is into the context. If you can find it. Between the context and the content, between the mainline and the hardline, falls the shadow.

— Pat Cadigan

If you can’t fuck it, and it doesn’t dance, eat it or throw it away.

— Pat Cadigan

Reaching in, he wrapped the exposed wires around his fingers and ripped them out. The locks released, letting the door fall open a crack.“That’s what we call a Luddite hack.”

— Pat Cadigan

He had the sudden urge to put his arms around her, but the look on her face said that if he made a move toward her, she would move away, and maybe she would keep moving away from him until the distance between them was too great to cross again in one lifetime.

— Pat Cadigan

That was it, then, civilization was officially collapsed if the cops had stopped ticketing abandoned cars and roosted on them instead.

— Pat Cadigan

Fez gave her a squeeze. “You’re a genius, Sam-I-Am.”“Sometimes that’s all it takes to be a genius.”

— Pat Cadigan

Ninety percent of life was being there, and the rest was being there on time.

— Pat Cadigan