The Future Quotes

“The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are. And humanity doesn’t have time for four hundred years of bloody war right now. There are so many emergencies to deal with.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“How does trust build between people? It is an offering and a receiving. It is putting yourself into the position to be hurt, just a little, and noticing that they refrain. It is the reaching out between people, laughing at the same moment. It is building a model of the other person inside yourself, placing them in the palm of your hand, rotating them and saying: Yes. I see the flaws and I see the dangers and nothing will happen here that will truly harm me. And it is saying: I would rather trust you than be alone.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“They laughed as children do when they are thrown high in the air. We are all falling, all the time, from the half-understood past to the unknowable future. The other name for falling without fear is flying.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Unfortunately these days quite a lot of people on the internet seem happy to live by the rule of salt. That’s a rule of infinite vendetta: scroll back years through a social media timeline, the worst thing you can find another person has done is totally legit to do to them. But then, that’s the worst thing you’ve done, and it’s legit to do it to you. And on and on, everyone trapped inside”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Mike used to say: how life happens is a letting in. When he was trying to convince me about the baby. He said every time it was an act of ridiculous trust. The sperm buries itself in the egg and stops being able to move. The egg lets down all its defenses and allows a foreign object in. That’s how it happens, every time. An absolutely unjustified leap of faith. Open up, let in, be let in. Opening is dangerous, every single time. But that’s how we’re here.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The future calls us on one painful step at a time and the first rule of life is to survive.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“There was fog, but behind the fog there was morning.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The most persistent hauntings are the ghosts of lost futures.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“I am never going to know how to live without a community of purpose. I am going to keep looking for this for the rest of my life, whatever happens.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“This is the pattern of the rule of salt. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The mental health of humanity continued to be strip-mined.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“We are always in the process of catching up to the future. Only when we get there, it’s never what we imagined. Sometimes, just once in a while, it’s better.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“A forum full of sovereign individuals who’ve never even met in person can, by that fact, feel free to become a deeply interconnected community. Meanwhile a backwoods cult of conformity turns people inwards, to the secret thoughts and the inner strengths they cannot share with others. The more Enoch wanted Martha to become an unalienable part of his kingdom, the more he had driven her to rely only and always on herself.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“What do you call it when you can’t do anything, but you can’t do nothing?”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The sperm says to the egg: Knock knock. The egg says: I’ve no reason to let you in. There are no guarantees. And yet, the egg opens up. And yet, the sperm wriggles in. And yet, two packets of information merge. That’s how all of us got here. That’s how nothing turns into something. That’s how a bare ball of rock ends up with gulls and shearwaters, with moss and lichen, with unfurling pale green leaves and scuttling millipedes and rabbits and foxes. That’s how we get life.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“well, they had another think coming.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“There’s a beautiful world on the far shore,” Martha said.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The algorithms can’t do everything. But if they can make us more polarized, more angry, and more hateful, surely they can do the opposite of that. There is no “neutral” anymore. There is no leaving things as they would have been before the invention of the internet. Our minds have already learned how to interact with the algorithms and we are part of it.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“I’m not into success as a metric.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Consequences are outside the parameters of the machine. After all, it is only a set of small pieces of cardboard, or silicon. It has no urge to reach out to other minds, to connect, to understand or be understood. It can have no sense of whether it is altering the human minds around it, of how the ubiquity of these systems of manipulation without empathy or compassion can slowly train human beings to fit in with them.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“A huge wash of information. Unprecedented. The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are. And humanity doesn’t have time for four hundred years of bloody war right now. There are so many emergencies to deal with.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“human beings long for certainty so much that we’re willing to even undermine and sabotage ourselves in the search for it.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The day was new now, as it is new every morning.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“flexifilm”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“But the sense that Zhen had in that moment of the whole world around her without names cannot be named. When you try to give it a word, when she thought “flag” and “sand,” she fell out of the world and back into symbols. There is no other way. The great evolutionary advantage of human beings is this brain that divides and sorts and names the world. You should not expect to escape it very often. Just remember that you can.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“It is not possible to express this with symbols. All that the symbols can ever be is a flag in the sand pointing at where to dig. You have found the treasure. It is the world as it is.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Wherever you are, the richness and complexity and inexhaustible, unplumbable thereness of the whole rushes in through your eyes and your ears and your nose and across your skin. Every single thing around you is right there and so are you. The teeming world is right there, and all of it is neither good nor bad, it just is.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“So the Talmud says it was an evil place. It was a crime in Sodom to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Beggars were given marked coins that no shop would accept. Welp. In the USA right now there are places where it’s a crime to help homeless people. Plenty of stores don’t accept food stamps. So are we in it? Do we have enough sense to get ourselves out if we are?”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Oh my God,’ said Ellen, and Zhen thought: Yes, this is how it begins.
This is how you know you’re grieving. When the whole thing strikes you as
absolutely outrageous, when you’re angry with your own mother for
fucking letting cancer take her and leaving you, that’s when you know
you’re in it.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future