Altered Carbon Quotes

The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.

If they asked how I died tell them: Still angry.

Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated.

Take what is offered and that must sometimes be enough.

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.

There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.

A weapon is a tool," she repeated, a little breathlessly. "A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension--you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.

... it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves.

Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.

Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves and burn your fingers once again.

like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.

The past is relevant only as data.

You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well, they don’t really matter anymore. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.

I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them.

Is it a wolf I hear, Howling his lonely communion With the unpiloted stars, Or merely the self importance and servitude In the bark of a dog? How many millenia did it take, Twisting and torturing The pride from the one To make a tool, The other? And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit? And who do we find to blame?.

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.

Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.

I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats. There.

Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic toward the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict's fingers through the trees that line the street.

Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.