Quotes from ballard j g v

Consumerism is honest, and teaches us that everything good has a barcode.

In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money.

Everywhere you look -- Britain, the States, western Europe -- people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake -- a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.

The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.

Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.

Sooner or later, all games become serious.

We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.

Travel is the last fantasy the 2Oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.

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.

Human beings today ... are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate.

Yes, we gave her drugs - we wanted to free her from those sinister clinics up in the hills, from those men in white coats who know best. Bibi needed to soar over our heads, dreaming her amphetamine dreams, coming off the beach in the evening and leading everyone into the cocaine night.

So, with all this time on my hands, I decided to start a revolution.

A passing wave swerved across the prow, and almost struck the megaphone from her hand. She swore at the playful foam, and listened to the echoes of her voice hunting among the rollers. As if bored with themselves, the amplified slogans had faded long before they could reach the shore.

I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d'Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.

A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed.