Ned Beauman > Quotes

“You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something. Indeed, perhaps you couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate almost everything.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“He realised at once that a mistake had been made: he had been sent the wrong hangover. Somewhere in northern Rhodesia there was a bull elephant who had got drunk on fermented marula fruit, rampaged through a nearby village, and fallen asleep in a ditch, and was now pleasantly surprised to find itself greeting the day with only the mild headache that follows a couple of bottles of good red wine… Perhaps if he got in touch with the relevant authorities he could get this unfortunate little mix-up corrected, but he would have to do so without moving his head or opening his eyes. Otherwise he would die from the pain.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“What does it do?" said Loeser.
"You feel as if you're being sucked down this fathomless, gloomy tunnel. Or to put it another way, it's as if all the different weights and cares of the world have been lifted from your shoulders to he replaced by a single, much larger sort of consolidated weight. Your limbs stop working and you can't really talk. If you take enough then it can last for hours and hours, but it seems like even longer because time slows down." Hildkraut smiled wistfully. "It's fantastic." At their feet, somebody groaned softly as if in enthusiastic assent. "And it makes Wagner sound really good.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“You really don’t believe that anything can have a value of its own beyond what function it serves for human beings?” Resaint said. “Value to who?” Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a planet in some remote galaxy—a lush, seething, glittering planet covered with stratospheric waterfalls, great land-sponges bouncing through the valleys, corals budding in perfect niveous hexagons, humming lichens glued to pink crystals, prismatic jellyfish breaching from the rivers, titanic lilies relying on tornadoes to spread their pollen—a planet full of complex, interconnected life but devoid of consciousness. “Are you telling me that, if an asteroid smashed into this planet and reduced every inch of its surface to dust, nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?” “But the universe is bloody huge—stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.” “I would be upset about the heat death of the universe too if human beings were accelerating the rate of it by a hundred times or more.” “And if a species’ position with respect to us doesn’t matter— you know, those amoebae they found that live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, if they’re just as important as Chiu Chiu or my parents’ dog, even though nobody ever gets anywhere near them—if distance in space doesn’t matter, why should distance in time? If we don’t care about whether their lives overlap with our lives, why even worry about whether they exist simultaneously with us? Your favorite wasp—Adelo-midgy-midgy—” “Adelognathus marginatum—” “It did exist. It always will have existed. Extinction can’t take that away. It went through its nasty little routine over and over again for millions and millions of years. The show was a big success. So why is it important that it’s still running at the same time you are? Isn’t that centering the whole thing on human beings, which is exactly what we’re not supposed to be doing? I mean, for that matter—reality is all just numbers anyway, right? I mean underneath? That’s what people say now. So why are you so down on the scans? Hacks aside. Why is it so crucial that these animals exist right now in an ostensibly meat-based format, just because we do? My point is you talk about extinction as if you’re taking this enlightened post-human View from Nowhere but if we really get down to it you’re definitely taking a View from Karin Resaint two arms two legs one head born Basel Switzerland year of our lord two-thousand-and-when-ever.” But Resaint wasn’t listening anymore.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker

“You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little
darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.”
― Ned Beauman, Boxer, Beetle

“...a portrait of a muscular grey-haired man with a grim, almost demented gaze and the sort of moustache that could beat you in an arm-wrestling contest.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“That was how Sinner got his first taste of anything other than the froth on his father's ale. It made you grimace, but if you drank enough it felt like discovering an entire hidden room in your own house that you'd never even known about. You wanted to do more than poke your head through the doorway. You wanted to take its dimensions.”
― Ned Beauman, Boxer, Beetle

“...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“Loeser's favourite book in Blimk's shop, where he spent most of his afternoons, was still Dames! And how to Lay them. He referred to it constantly, like a psalter, with an inexhaustible excitement at the notion that it was possible to seduce a woman just by following a rigorous system of instructions. The problem was, there wasn't much in it that he felt he could put to practical use. 'Want to impress a dame with morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she's still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That's one of every type of egg on a tray: a soft-boiled egg, a hard-boiled egg, an egg over easy, an egg sunny side up, a poached egg, a devilled egg, a pickled egg, a coddled egg, a scrambled egg, a one-egg omelette, and a shot of egg nog for the hangover. No dame will be able to believe you know so many ways to cook eggs. Egg protein is good for the manly function, and after you've pulled off the Egg Majestique, you'll probably need it, if you know what I mean.' This sounded pretty authoritative to Loeser but he just wasn't quite sure.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“accidents, like women, allude”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“So intense was his sexual frustration that it had begun to feel like a life-threatening illness: testicular gout, libidinal gangrene.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“Resaint was disheartened to learn that Selim was, to borrow Halyard’s expression, “just another extinction industry cunt.” Leftists sometimes asserted that within a capitalist framework there could never be a solution to the extinction crisis that was untainted by profiteering and abuse, because the free market was like some malevolent AI, infinitely more devious than the humans who thought they could constrain it; but Resaint’s own proposal was simply that each of the hundred thousand wealthiest individuals on earth should be randomly assigned a vulnerable species and then informed that if their assigned species were ever to go extinct they would be executed by hanging.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker

“If I want to feel as if I'm being sucked down a fathomless gloomy tunnel for hours and hours then I have a complete set of Schopenhauer at home.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“What he hates about whisky hangovers, he thinks now, is the synthesis they achieve between the spiritual and the gastric, as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised life is meaningless.”
― Ned Beauman, Glow

“The Nazis, he had written in his latest, "are wedded to a sort of aesthetico-moral fallacy, which is that if a man has blond hair, blue eyes and strong features, then he will also be brave, loyal, intelligent and so on. They truly believe that goodness has some causal relationship with beauty. Which is idiotic, yes, but no more idiotic than you are, Egon. When you see a girl like Adele Hitler with an innocent, pretty face, can you honestly tell me you don't assume she must be an angelic person? Even though it makes about as much sense as astrology.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“She had so many freckles that Erskine wondered if she might have stolen some from other children.”
― Ned Beauman, Boxer, Beetle

“You couldn’t truly love anything if you didn’t hate at least something.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“You know she'll probably be at the party tonight? Which is why I'm absolutely not going if we don't get some coke.'
'Egon, why is it that every single time you're obliged to be in the same room with one of your ex-girlfriends you have to make it into a huge emergency? It's incredibly boring.'
'Come on. You know how it is. You catch sight of an old flame and get this breathless
animal prickle like a fox in a room with a hound. And then all night you have to seem carefree and successful and elated, which is a pretence that for some reason you feel no choice but to maintain even though you know they're better qualified than anyone else
in the world to detect immediately that you're really the same hapless cunt as ever.'
'That's adolescent. The fact that you are so neurotic about your past lovers makes it both fortunate and predictable that you have so few of them. It's one of those elegant self-regulating systems that one so often finds in nature.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“Hoe het ook zij, dat was dus Lavicini's ongeluk met de teleportatiemachine. Loesers teleportatieongeluk was op geen stukken na zo ernstig. Er vielen geen doden. Het Allianztheater werd niet verwoest. Alleen Klugweils beide armen raakten uit de kom.
Dat werd overigens pas later vastgesteld. Het enige wat Loeser en Blumstein zagen nadat ze waren toegesneld, was dat Klugweil half uit zijn riemen hing met zijn armen en benen in rare hoeken, lijkbleek en met uitpuilende ogen. Het schouwspel deed Loeser onweerstaanbaar denken aan een stel bovenmaatse, bleke mannelijke geslachtsdelen die op pijnlijke wijze klem zaten in een sportbroekje.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“The diversity of life on earth was (as far as anyone knew) the most majestic thing in the universe, and human beings were (as far as anyone knew) the only living things with the capacity to appreciate that majesty, and yet human beings were also the ones who were stamping that majesty out, not deliberately but carelessly, incidentally, leaving nothing behind but a few scans and samples that nobody would ever look at.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker

“It's not the fall that kills you, it's the landing. That was what people always said. And she's had no fall to speak of, but a hell of a lot of landing to make up for it.”
― Ned Beauman, Madness is Better than Defeat

“bisontine”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“Loeser herinnerde zich nog goed wanneer hij voor het eerst van de nieuwe drug ketamine had gehoord.
...
'Het voelt alsof je een peilloos diepe, donkere tunnel in wordt gezogen. Of, anders gezegd, alsof alle lasten en zorgen van het leven van je schouders zijn getild en zijn vervangen door één enkele, veel zwaardere en massievere last. Je armen en benen doen het niet meer en je kunt niet meer goed praten. Als je genoeg inneemt kan het uren duren, maar het lijkt nog langer omdat de tijd vertraagt.' Hildkraut glimlachte droefgeestig. 'Het is geweldig.' Aan hun voeten kreunde iemand zachtjes als om zijn woorden kracht bij te zetten. 'En Wagner klinkt opeens fantastisch.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“Global stock markets, rattled by the hacking of the unhackable, were down about a third of a percent, comparable to a rogue state testing a nuclear bomb or a major economy electing a mildly left-wing government.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker

“...he decided to go back to sleep, wondering if it was possible to set his alarm clock to wake him up when everyone he knew was dead.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“Pain could make a coward of you; the experience might weaken her resolve. And her resolve was to be nursed day and night. If she ever felt it slipping—if the thought of that blood lather in her windpipe ever began to frighten her—the cure was a documentary about Jane Goodall’s early years among the chimpanzees of Tanzania. She’d seen it so many times already that often just a twenty-minute refresher was enough. To be taken back to the 1960s, when it was still possible for a human being to face a wild animal without grief, without shame, without any inkling of the Black Hole gaping wider and wider—to compare that innocence with the present day, when almost every such contact was soaked through with horror and loss—that was all it took to restore to her an iron determination. Wittgenstein, when he was contemplating suicide, had summed up the mindset as “the state of not being able to get over a particular fact.” As she’d said so many times to Halyard, she wasn’t suicidal—and yet that fit her pretty well. Everything was broken. The only remaining valid actions were those taken in reaction to that fact, and they were valid only in proportion to the honesty and completeness of the reaction.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker

“When she'd done her masters, she'd believed that artificial intelligence was about computer minds ascending into person-hood, but this was more about human minds decaying out of it.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker

“Er waren al veel gouden eeuwen geweest en Loeser wist zeker dat ze allemaal hetzelfde waren geweest en altijd hetzelfde zouden zijn. Vergelijk het Venetië van de late Renaissance, waar Lavicini volwassen werd, met het Berlijn van Weimar, of het Berlijn van Weimar met de stad dit in 2012 de meest modieuze zou zijn, en je zou er dezelfde leeghoofdige mensen treffen dit naar dezelfde nietszeggende feesten gingen en dezelfde holle frasen spuiden over dezelfde inhoudsloze werken, en alleen aan de barre buitenste grenzen een paar stuiptrekkingen van kunst die werkelijk de moeite waard waren.”
― Ned Beauman

“It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon.”
― Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

“On the contrary, parasitic wasps were so repugnant to the soul that they had become a classic argument against creationism: "I cannot persuade myself," wrote Darwin in 1860, "that a beneficient and omnipotent God could have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." Nobody ever made remarks like that about pandas. Nobody ever said to Chiu Chiu, 'You prove there is no God who loves us.”
― Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker