Contacts Quotes

“We often hear that technology is fragmenting the world, reducing our relationships to screen exchanges rather than the real stuff, and so on, as if machines - rather than humans - were responsible for maintaining our mental health. I wanted to write something which explored the opposite possibility: that phones give us a power to affect and improve each other's lives that we have never had in history before. Contacts was of course written before the bewildering events of 2020, but the lockdown has reminded a lot of us how dependent we all are upon the core relationships in life, on our networks, and perhaps how much we've taken some of those relationships for granted. Contacts is about the fact that, for all its dangers, the age of instant communication gives us what is basically a superpower... If we only choose to use it.”
― Mark Watson, Contacts

“You defined yourself by participating in other people's lives.”
― Mark Watson, Contacts

“But excuses didn't mean anything in the end. What actually happened in the end was what mattered.”
― Mark Watson, Contacts

“But excuses didn't mean anything in the end. What _actually happened_ in the end was what mattered.”
― Mark Watson, Contacts

“Christ”
― Mark Watson, Contacts

“And all the times she’d been called a control freak, they were right, but they didn’t understand why: because what she couldn’t control was terrifying. Because what we couldn’t control was death and that was too much for her brain, that was what sometimes made her so frightened that she could not make a mental connection with anything else, made her stop in the street and want to buckle over.”
― Mark Watson, Contacts