“I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“Horns sounded from the trapped vehicles on the motorway, a despairing chorus.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“Какая деталь разбивающейся машины поцеловала этот пенис на свадьбе его оргазма и хромированной ручки прибора?”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
“This dreamlike logic hung over the entire afternoon.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Crash
J.G. Ballard
Born place: in Shanghai, China
Born date November 15, 1930
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“Do not test the measure of his love for you by the way he expresses his body's heat. He is not thinking of you at those times. He is thinking of himself.”
― Pearl S. Buck, quote from Pavilion of Women: A Novel of Life in the Women's Quarters
“Make peace within, and there will be no one who can overcome you. And no one you will wish to overcome.”
― Dan Millman, quote from The Journeys of Socrates
“...friends were more important than lovers - not least for the fact that friendships generally lasted longer than relationships.”
― John Irving, quote from In One Person
“think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?2 Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps,”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
“I almost regret having to tell him this. No one should be confronted with the depths of darkness they're capable of all at once.”
― Cristin Terrill, quote from All Our Yesterdays
Go Ask Alice
The Graveyard Book
Mansfield Park
Tuck Everlasting
Dear John
The Amazing Adventur...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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