Quotes About Impact

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.

It is the violent act that makes history and changes everything that came before.

People eat and sleep in the shadow of what we do

Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some distance, out beyond the towers.

Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.

The game doesn't change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.' 'And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.

Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen.

It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.

What's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone.

The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

Technology has become a force of nature. We can't control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there's nowhere for us to hide.

You're saying maybe you're taking something that has the side effect of impairing memory." "Either I'm taking something and I don't remember or I'm not taking something and I don't remember. My life is either/or. Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps.

Where were you when James Dean died?" he said in a threatening voice.

Every day on the news there's another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn't the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it's not an everyday occurrence?

These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People

words stick even as lives fly apart.

Making one new friend can make a difference.