“Sooner or later, all games become serious.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“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.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“I love the smell of male urine and the reek of his groin on my bath towels after he’d had a shower”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“People no longer need enemies--in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free...”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“Nothing about sex ever shocks women. At least, men’s kind of sex.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
J.G. Ballard
Born place: in Shanghai, China
Born date November 15, 1930
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“The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from Outliers: The Story of Success
“Memory is a tenuous thing. . . .
flickering glimpses, blue
and white, like ancient,
decomposing 16mm film.
Happiness escapes
me there, where faces
are vague and yesterday
seems to come tied
up in ribbons of pain.
Happiness? I look for it intead
in today, where memory
is something I can still
touch, still rely on.
I find it in the smiles
of new friends, the hope
blossoming inside.
My happiest memories
have no place in the
past; they are those
I have yet to create.”
― Ellen Hopkins, quote from Impulse
“Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here”—that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms. And now it was happening here.”
― John Wyndham, quote from The Day of the Triffids
“Well, when you're fourteen years old, you can't afford to mix in a rock fight with your five-year-old brother. You can't do it, even when you're in the right. You just can't explain a thing like that to your folks. All they'll do is point out how much bigger you are, how unfair it is to your little brother.”
― Fred Gipson, quote from Old Yeller
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The SoundBookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
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