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

“The most persistent hauntings are the ghosts of lost futures.”
― 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

“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

“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

“There never used to be a way to own the contents of everyone’s address book. Or the list of things you bought at the store. Or the words you’d used to talk to your friends. Or the data about where you are. Or the pictures you’d drawn and put in a gallery or on your wall. They’ve taken all that information – scraped the data. They’ve amalgamated that and made it more efficient, but they haven’t used that efficiency to benefit us all; they’ve used it to enrich themselves and keep the rest of us poor.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Only a few paces in, the darkness became absolute. The stone was around her and she felt the weight of the mountain as if it were pressing on her head. A feeling both unsettling and comforting, something remembered from long ago, the terror of what might be inside this small space with her. This is why we built houses with windows and blinds. This is why we invented glass. This is why we discovered electricity. This is why we split the atom. It’s because this feeling is unbearable.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“There is always a future to imagine until it is gone.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“The golden rule is a vastly valuable social technology carefully passed down to us by people who fought their way out of darkness using it.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“Listen: nothing in the world is truly owned. There is no tree or patch of soil or animal or mountain or river that grows a label naming its owner on its bark or on its flesh or through the strata of its rocks. Once upon a time, "owning" meant "having a special duty to care" for something, not that you alone could have it or use it.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“How do you know you're living in the end times? Or to put it another way, how was the quality of life in Sodom the day before the Lord firebombed the shit out of it?”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“We walk into illusions gladly, eager for release from our encircling selves.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“There is, when it comes right down to it and as Martha had mentioned to Lenk many times, a trajectory to human affairs. It appears to be ruled by logic, but the rhythm of it is the rhythm of fear. If you might do something to me, then it is only right for me to have the capacity to do the same to you. This is the pattern of the rule of salt. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“There was no future now; time did not point as an arrow, it was a spiral, around the seasons again and again until one day her bones would sink into the earth and her flesh would go to start some other life again. Well. Good.”
― 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 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