Ellie Spice > Ellie's Quotes

“Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.”
― J.G. Ballard

“Horns sounded from the trapped vehicles on the motorway, a despairing chorus.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“These people were content with their environment, and felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and organizations, and if anything welcoming these intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new kind of 20th century life. 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 disappointed. Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later.”
― J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

“The crystal trees among them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead. The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic miniarets and baroque domes. On a law of green glass spurs, a child’s tricycle gleamed like a Faberge gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World

“Politics is the Art of Controlling Your Enviroment.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again... ”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

“I don't mean to say that I'm about to state my credo here on this page, but merely to affirm, sincerely for the first time in my life, my belief in man as an individual and independent entity. Certainly not independence in the everyday sense of the word, but pertaining to a freedom and mobility of thought that few people are able - or even have the courage - to achieve.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

“This was not a good idea coming home for Christmas. I'm too old. Years ago, coming back from schools or trips, I always expected some sort of new perspective or fresh insight about the family on returning. That doesn't happen anymore-the days of revelation about my parents, at least, are over... its time to move on. I think we'd all appreciate that.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

“I ma trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet -- with just one person inside even -- I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies.”
― Douglas Coupland, Player One: What Is to Become of Us

“Face it: You're always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“love be damned now
as love was damned when it
first arrived.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide.
I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they'll spit on you.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Oh love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me. I'll be anybody you want me to be.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“I tiger can smile
A snake will say it loves you
Lies make us evil”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“If you died right now, how would you feel about your life?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“When you considered this world--people winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cages and speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking everywhere, and arctic winds mingling with dusty gaps of fire from the planet's core--it was hard to believe how delicate life was, how breakable things were.”
― Martin Amis, Other People

“When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“The fact was that facts were losing their value. Stalin had broken the opposition. He was also far advanced toward his much stranger objective of breaking the truth. Or it may have been the other way about: actuality, under Stalin, was such that dread and disgust forbade you to accept it— or even to contemplate it.”
― martin amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

“Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori, (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were.
Who somebody really was. That was the Zone of interest.”
― Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

“He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don’t do that. Except when we’re pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake with our fake faces.
He grinned. No He didn’t. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you’d better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.
She laughed. No she didn’t. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.
He smiled.
Not quite true.
All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write.”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“In freedom, every non-nomenklatura citizen knew perpetual hunger – the involuntary slurp and gulp of the esophagus. In camp, your hunger kicked as I imagine a fetus would kick. It was the same with boredom. And boredom, by now, has lost all its associations with mere lassitude and vapidity. Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion; it is itself an emotion, and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom.”
― Martin Amis, House of Meetings

“If every cunt had a ride whin they hud a heidache, thir widnae be as much fuckin trouble in the world.”
― Irvine Welsh, Porno

“We tend to be rather murky little ponds, containing many layers of suspended dirt and grime and our greatest depths are stirred by the strangest of currents.”
― Irvine Welsh, Glue

“Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“His response was to fight it with the only weapons at hand—passive resistance and open displays of contempt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan