As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us... is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child is born with the potential ability to learn Chinese or Swahili, play a kazoo, climb a tree, make a strudel or a birdhouse,... take pleasure in finding the coordinates of a star. Genetic inheritance determines a child's abilities and weaknesses. But those who raise a child call forth from that matrix the traits and talents they consider important.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The matrix is God?" "In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate ... to say that the matrix has a God, since... this being's omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix." "If it has limits, it isn't omnipotent." "Exactly.... Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl.... He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline hi...gh, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the Matrix.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belongin...g and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination--unstanchable as that red flood may be--but rather the albumen in ...the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »