M.T. Anderson Quotes

“The mall was really busy, there were a lot of crowds there. They were buying all this stuff, like the inflatable houses for their kids, and the dog massagers, and the tooth extensions that people were wearing, the white ones which you slid over your real teeth and they made your mouth just like one big single tooth going all the way across.”

“There’s nothing but the feed telling you, This is the music you heard. This is the music you missed. This is what is new. Listen.”

“Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.”

“We got there and it had been torn down. They had built a pretty nice stucco mall there, so Loga and Quendy said we should go in and buy some cool stuff to go out in. That seemed good to us. I wanted to buy some things but I didn’t know what they were... Quendy bought some shoes, but the minute she walked out of the store she didn’t like them anymore. Marty couldn’t think of anything he wanted, so he ordered this really null shirt. He said it was so null it was like ordering nothing.”

“I didn’t know how close she was to the person who had gone completely fugue at the party.”

“There were some weather blimps in front of us. They were all yellow in the sunset that was spreading over the CloudsTM.”

“We watched the sea move around. It was dead, but colorful. It was blue when the sun hit it one way, and purple when the sun hit it another way, and sometimes yellow or green. We had on suits so we wouldn’t smell it.”

“We had a party at the end of the week over at Quendy’s, because her parents were off choking somewhere. That was when everyone was having those choking parties. I mean, it was completely midlife crisis.”

“Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of Oh? Wow! Thing! Had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool.”

“What I’m doing, what I’ve been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it. I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”

“Her face, it was like, I don’t know, it was beautiful. It just, it wasn’t the way--I guess it wasn’t just the way it looked like, but also how she was standing. With her arm. I just started at her. I was getting some meg feed on the food bar and the pot stickers were really cheap.”

“We went out to this place that Marty said served the best electrolyte chunkies, but it had closed a year before. It was dinnertime, so we had dinner at a J.P. Barnum’s Family Extravaganza, which was pretty good, and just like the one at home. We got some potato skins for appetizers.”

“It’s times like this that I’m real glad I have friends. They say friends are worth your weight in gold.”

“They have charts that show which chords are the most thumbs-up. Music is marketing. They have lists of key changes that get thirteen-year-old girls screaming. There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles.”

“She told me about the scales on butterflies, and the way animals lived in ducts, sometimes whole herds. People would hear the stampeding through their walls. There were new kinds of fungus, she said, that were making jungles where the cables ran. There were slugs so big a toddler could ride them sidesaddle. ‘The natural world is so adaptable,’ she said. ‘So adaptable you wonder what’s natural.‘”

“It’s Riot Gear. It’s retro. It’s beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It’s been big since earlier this week.”

“I feel real sorry for people who have to travel by themselves. In space, that must suck. When you’re going places with other people, with this big group, everyone is leaning toward each other, and people are laughing and they’re chatting, and things are great, and it’s just like in a commercial for jeans, or something with nougat.”

“Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.”

“I hoped she could see my smile in the light of my brain.”

“It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we could see the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.”