michael berry > michael's Quotes

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“They have machines for that now,” I say, pointing. “Yes, they do,” he agrees. “But the automation of labour is a conspiracy of de-humanisation. Work is of our nature. Giving even our chores to the machine saves time at the expense of self.”
― Nick Harkaway, Titanium Noir

“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
― William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

“All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?

Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash.

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”
― Nathanael West

“They worried and bit their nails. They were grotesque, like useless young men in a depression. They moved sideways, like crabs.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimolous to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“What? -- RICHARD M NIXON”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Don't forget the real business of the war is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“To fight in a war,' he said. 'Can you imagine?'

'Would that mean facing death every day and doing what other people tell you to do?' I asked.

'I reckon.'

'Yes, Huck. I can imagine.”
― Percival Everett, James

“I am the angel of death, come to offer sweet justice in the night. I am a sign I am your future. I am James.”
― Percival Everett, James