Little Fragments of Life @littlefragmentsoflife - Tumblr Blog

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

George Orwell, 1984

#literature #george orwell #1984

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell, 1984

#literature #george orwell #1984

Crouched on the staircase with their fingers on the metal rails, they listened to the secret murmurs of the building, the distant spasms of violence that communicated themselves like bursts of radiation from another universe.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

‘Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse...’

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

In the apartment building, [...] the servants who waited on her were an invisible army of thermostats and humidity sensors, computerized elevator route-switches and over-riders, playing their parts in a far more sophisticated and abstract version of the master-servant relationship.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

The old social sub-divisions, based on power, capital and self-interest, had re-asserted themselves here as anywhere else.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

There was something in this feeling-the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

The restoration of light in due course revealed its crop of illicit liaisons flourishing in the benevolent conditions of total darkness like a voracious plant species.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

The mysterious movements of the air-hostesses as they pursued their busy social lives, particularly on the floors above her own, clearly unsettled Alice, as if they in some way interfered with the natural social order of the building, its system of precedences entirely based on floor-height.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

By contrast with the calm and unencumbered geometry of the concert-hall and television studios below him, the ragged skyline of the city resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis.

J.G. Ballard, High-Rise

#literature #jg ballard #high-rise

The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.