Neuromancer

“People,” Deane said, around a ginger bonbon. “What sort of people? Friends?”
Case nodded.
“Not always that easy to know who your friends are, is it?”

It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction

The sky above the port

Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it!

‘Wonderful,’ the Flatline said, ‘I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.

I like it, you know? Like I’ve always talked to myself, in my head, when I’ve been in tight spots. Pretend I got some friend, somebody I can trust, and I’ll tell ’em what I really think, what I feel like, and then I’ll pretend they’re telling me what they think about that, and I’ll just go along that way. Having you in is kinda like that.

That is the way to handle tears.’ He drank again

Then you’ve already learned an important lesson, for one so young

‘I don’t cry, much.’
‘But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?’
‘I spit,’ she said. ‘The ducts are routed back into my mouth.’

He’d expected some clean hive of disciplined activity, but Molly had seen no one. Her monologue made him uneasy; she’d never told him that much about herself before. Aside from her story in the cubicle, she’d seldom said anything that had even indicated that she had a past