The voices / 80 fragments

J.G. Ballard

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

Author and source reference ↗

▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗time work life truth learning nature death happiness

Archive entries

01Undated

In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

J.G. Ballard / quote

02Undated

Unhappy parents teach you a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

J.G. Ballard / quote

03Undated

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

J.G. Ballard / quote

04Undated

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

J.G. Ballard / quote

05Undated

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage.

J.G. Ballard / quote

06Undated

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.

J.G. Ballard / quote

07Undated

Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.

J.G. Ballard / quote

08Undated

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

J.G. Ballard / quote

09Undated

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.

J.G. Ballard / quote

10Undated

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

J.G. Ballard / quote

11Undated

The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.

J.G. Ballard / quote

12Undated

If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.

J.G. Ballard / quote

13Undated

First wives are a rite of passage into adult life. In many ways it’s important that first marriages go wrong. That’s how we learn the truth about ourselves.

J.G. Ballard / quote

14Undated

...reason rationalizes reality for him (Dr. Nathan) as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects about which we should not be reasonable.

J.G. Ballard / quote

15Undated

She had originally agreed to appear naked, but on seeing the cars informed me that she would only appear topless—an interesting logic was at work there.

J.G. Ballard / quote

16Undated

Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.

J.G. Ballard / quote

17Undated

Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques.

J.G. Ballard / quote

18Undated

Sex × Technology = the Future.

J.G. Ballard / quote

19Undated

Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair...!''And in my heart?''In your womb I'll set a fly-trap!

J.G. Ballard / quote

20Undated

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 dissapointed.

J.G. Ballard / quote

21Undated

The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.

J.G. Ballard / quote

22Undated

We have annexed the future into our present as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us

J.G. Ballard / quote

23Undated

the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways

J.G. Ballard / quote

24Undated

In effect, the apartment block was a small vertical city, its two thousand inhabitants boxed up into the sky.j.g.

J.G. Ballard / quote