Quotes About Consumption

You know that if I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants.

The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.

The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge. She wonders why she bought it. The tabloid doesn't go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.

You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn't even imagine wanting.

Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.

He drinks the vodka. He watches television. And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed behind filters.

Success, it seems to me, would be somewhat meaningless if the play were not a personal contribution. The author who creates only for audience consumption is only engaged in a financial enterprise.

We know the fast-food companies have big ad budgets, we know that they outspend healthy messages, but 20 times more, 143 times more, 350 times more? What's the big deal?

and the wrong one for others, depending on their bank account and their movie lust.

Trying to show you something. The stick—it scared you, right? It may even have hurt you, if you hadn't been so quick. But look—in trying to burn you, it's consuming itself. That's what happens to a heart—

I read everywhere. It's like a bodily function. I don't need quiet. I write and read with the TV on. I follow the TV show while I read. TV doesn't require a lot of brainpower.

A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.

China's import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi's Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia's export of oil or Germany's export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

Greed is a snarling monster with a set of razor-sharp teeth on both sides of its head. It devours not only those from whom it takes, but also those who eagerly receive its plunder.

Just these," Nina replied, holding up a fist full of balsa wood chopsticks. "That's okay," Walter said, tipping the box to his lips like a cup and slurping up the noodles.

If modern civilised man had to keep the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.

Seuls les ménages agricoles élèvent des cochons, mais c'est dans tous les ménages que l'on cuit des côtelettes. Par conséquent tous les ménages, et non les seuls ménages agricoles, produisent pour leur propre consommation. C'est donc une somme importante de services et de valeurs que néglige la Comptabilité nationale.

the United States consumes 80 percent of the world's supply of Ritalin

Was that such a heresy, to admit that your love for your family wasn't sufficiently all-consuming as to extinguish all other desires?

We're all eating stars! Every day! What a marvelous annulus of accident and need.

It's easy for Americans to forget that the food they eat doesn't magically appear on a supermarket shelf.

Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh.

All yings are time rats, time bandits. Open their guts and what you find inside their digestive tract are the second and minutes of hundreds of men's lives. Time cannibals. All those broken minute and hour hands just lying undigested in their stomach. It makes me want to drink.