In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.
Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.
Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.
Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don’t you realize that those two species are extinct now?
The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.
If their work is satisfying people don’t need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.
First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages go wrong. That’s how we learn the truth about ourselves.
…reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.
She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there.
Sex is now a conceptual act, it’s probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.
They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never dissapointed.
The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.
We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us
the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways
In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.
I’m a strong opponent of all religious belief.(Conversations pg 96)
Have you noticed how vocabularies fluctuate in order to cope with our need to justify ourselves?
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
Once it gets off the ground into space, all science fiction is fantasy.
Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance.
The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.
The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.
She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.
The trouble with you people is that you’ve been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life.
…the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.
In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.
So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.
He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother.
He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs.”One rule in life”, he murmured to himself. “If you can smell garlic, everything is all right”.
If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one.
Jim knew that he was awake and asleep at the same time, dreaming of the war and yet dreamed of by the war.
The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it.
A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.
Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.
Kill a politician and you’re tied to the motive that made you pull the trigger.
Almost pedantically, she added: “They’re not really bombs– they’re acoustic provocations.
In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.
this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence.
the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.