How the Dead Live Quotes

“Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“Death is its own best friend, and our dreams know it.”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“If I were dying when I should've, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I'd have to kill him, then – then I would've written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They're here, they're grown-up, they're crap, and so we'll bicker towards oblivion.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“She began to take exercise far too late, embarking on tiny cycling tours to music festivals, or flower shows, or doing the rounds of churches – there were so many spires in her uninspiring adopted home. Three kids, one episiotomy, two continents, many phobias, lots of depressions. Old fat lady's underwear. It was all a curse upon cycling, which she'd taken up for what reason? Believe it or not, not even the bulbous seventies there were still bulbous, middle-aged women such as she, who thought that the principle of cycling meant something. They cycled and they ate in health-food restaurants like Cranks or Ceres, their cussedness aimed at appeasing the Earth Goddess herself. They almost fucking overdosed on grated carrot; while sipping fucking prune juice. They invented being environmentally-conscious, with their vegetable-buying co-operatives which gave them an excuse to put gumboots on in town.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“And she withdraws through the double, ceiling-high doors, which are really the only original feature left in this heavily converted apartment. And isn't the same true of me? All that was once me has been dispersed through the flux of a thousand thousand experiences. The 'I' has been partitioned off, remodelled, resurfaced and re-insulated, so that it cannot even remember what the original dados or mouldings were like. They say ninety per cent of house dust is dead human skin – and that's me. Dust on a windowsill, in a converted apartment, in a foreign city.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“PM está excesivamente organizada y se basa en gran medida en una ineficiente burocracia absurda.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“I looked at this man. He was in his fifties, mostly bones inside his black suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“I looked at this man. He was in his fifites, mostly bones inside hisblack suit, and gave off an odour, if you were as close up to him as I was, of a long-closed keyboard opened suddenly in an empty house. (73)”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“The eternal cycle, the beginning, middle and end of a human being, the incomprehensible dance in the magic of our own theatre will continue forever. But ignorance of our birth and death makes us largely mad; the majority of us clap at our disasters as though they are a play: but it is a work we cannot possibly understand.”
― Derek Raymond, How the Dead Live

“Oh, the future--it's always so fucking dated. For you, for me, for all of us. If only there were some way out of it.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“In death there are smaller premises, littler ironies.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“Whereas we, the dead, are the true inheritors of the Modern. The live lot assemble time into lazy decadences--ten-year periods of conspicuous attitudinising, which are only ever grasped in nostalgic retrospect.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live