Pat Cadigan

"If you need someone to believe something, make them go for a walk with you. Walking takes up most of the energy they’d use to disbelieve you."

"Everybody wants to be somebody but nobody wants to be just anybody."

"I pushed her back hard. “You don’t belong with them; you’re not special, you have no place in any unseen world; you’re like me and the rest of our family. Get used to it!” She looked at me like I’d slapped her. “Oh, sorry,” I said, feeling equally stung by her reaction. “It’s hell being ordinary, but that’s the human condition.”"

"Technology disgusts me. My senses tell me what I need to know. The rest is noise."

"If a dataline is running and there’s no one there to watch it, has anything really happened?"

"Help him by helping him resist your help."

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

"Meditation was such a loose term; you can do almost anything mentally and call it meditation."

"And that vulgar gold lamé upholstery giving me a rash. You can dispute taste but you can’t stop it."

"Old responses live long, die hard, and frequently leave a troublesome corpse."

"If fasting really had anything to do with enlightenment then millions of people throughout the ages had died of the secret of life. And the secret of life was, in its entirety, that starvation hurt like a bastard."

"That was the real price, I thought. Once you had power, you ended up having to depend on it. Eventually, like anything else, it owned you. Eventually? No, from the beginning; we just don’t bother admitting it at first."