Crash Quotes

“I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“I guessed that he was one of those ambitious young physicians who more and more fill the profession, opportunists with a fashionable hoodlum image, openly hostile to their patients. My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“This dreamlike logic hung over the entire afternoon.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“The long triangular grooves on the car had been formed within the death of an unknown creature, its vanished identity abstracted in terms of the geometry of this vehicle. How much more mysterious would be our own deaths, and those of the famous and powerful?”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Какая деталь разбивающейся машины поцеловала этот пенис на свадьбе его оргазма и хромированной ручки прибора?”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses. In this magic pool, lifting from her throat like a rare discharge of fluid from the mouth of a remote and mysterious shrine, I saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit, distilled from a mouth whose contours only a few minutes before had drawn steadily against my penis.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Horns sounded from the trapped vehicles on the motorway, a despairing chorus.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the heamorrhages of their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reactions vessels.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“As I sat with her by the airport fence in her darkened car, her white breast in my hand lit by the ascending airliners, the shape and tenderness of her nipple seemed to rape my fingers.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“The draped body of the dead man was lifted from the bonnet of my car. Seated like a demented madonna between the doors of the second ambulance, his wife gazed vacantly at the evening traffic. The wound in her right cheek was slowly deforming her face as the bruised tissues gorged themselves on their own blood.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind … We live inside an enormous novel … The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent reality.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Do kraja boravka u bolnici, nisam više video doktorku Helen Remington, ali sam, dok sam ležao na praznom odeljenju, neprekidno razmišljao o sudaru koji nas je spojio. Izmedu mene i te ožalošcene mlade žene javio se snažan osecaj erotske privlacnosti, gotovo kao da sam podsvesno želeo da nas dvoje u
njenoj materici ponovo zacnemo njenog mrtvog muža. Ako bih ušao u njenu vaginu, tu na odeljenju za rendgensko snimanje, medu metalnim ormaricima i belim kablovima, nekako bih prizvao njenog muža iz mrtvih, stvorio bih ga iz spoja njenog levog pazuha i hromiranog postolja za rendgenski aparat, iz
sjedinjenja naših genitalija s fino izradenim poklopcem za objektiv.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Nas últimas fotografias os ferimentos que iriam mascarar seu rosto começavam a aparecer, como os traços de uma segunda personalidade, uma prévia das faces ocultas de sua psique que somente emergiriam depois na meia-idade.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Aos meus pés havia uma camada de folhas mortas, maços de cigarros vazios e vidro estilhaço. Aqueles fragmentos de pára-brisa, varridos para o lado por gerações de enfermeiros de ambulância, formavam uma pequena duna. Fiquei olhando para aquele colar empoeirado, o entulho de mil acidentes de automóvel. Em cinquenta anos, à medida que mais e mais carros colidissem ali, os estilhaços de vidro formariam uma barreira considerável, em trinta anos, uma praia de cristal afiado. Uma nova raça de vagabundos de praia talvez aparecesse, agachando-se junto àqueles montes de pára-brisas esfacelados, vasculhando à procura de tocos de cigarro, camisinhas usadas e moedas perdidas. Enterrada sob aquele novo estrato geológico sedimentado pela era dos acidentes de automóvel estaria minha própria pequena morte, tão anônima quanto cicatrizes vitrificadas numa árvore fóssil.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Minha breve estada no hospital já me convencera de que a profissão médica era uma porta aberta para qualquer pessoa que nutrisse ressentimento contra a raça humana.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“O contínuo interesse erótico de Catherine por sua secretária parecia um interesse tanto pela ideia de fazer amor com ela como pelos prazeres físicos do ato sexual em si. Seja como for, essas experiências tinham começado a tornar mais abstratas todas as nossas relações, tanto entre nós como com outras pessoas. Logo ela não conseguia mais atingir o orgasmo sem uma elaborada fantasia de um ato sexual lésbico com Kare, de seu clitóris sendo lambido, mamilos excitados, ânus acariciado. Essas descrições me pareciam uma linguagem em busca de objetos, ou mesmo, talvez, o limiar de uma nova sexualidade alheia a qualquer expressão física possível.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Already the skin picked in a palisade of notches from her lower lip marked the arithmetic of widowhood, the desperate calculation that she would never find another lover.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“In the screen of the rear-view mirror I watched the cars climbing the access ramp on to the motorway behind us, eager arrivals at this aerial carnival.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“He stood beside me at the bar when I rose to greet him, barely bothering to recognise me, as if I were some unfamiliar blur.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“For some reason I remembered Catherine saying once that she would never be satisfied until every conceivable act of copulation in the world had at last taken place.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“As he surveyed the scene I had the sense that Vaughan was controlling us all, giving each of us what we most wanted and most feared.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Sitting beside him, I felt my hostility giving way to a certain deference; even, perhaps, subservience.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatising himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“The amplified fragments of his commentary reverberated around the empty stands as if trying to escape.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“My crash was a wayward experience of a type her own life and sexuality had taught her to understand.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash