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Hari Kunzru QUOTES

Hari Kunzru QUOTES

1 " What if one were to want to hunt for these hidden presences? You can’t just rummage around like you’re at a yard sale. You have to listen. You have to pay attention. There are certain things you can’t look at directly. You need to trick them into revealing themselves. That’s what we’re doing with Walter, Jaz. We’re juxtaposing things, listening for echoes. It’s not some silly cybernetic dream of command and control, modeling the whole world so you can predict the outcome. It’s certainly not a theory of everything. I don’t have a theory of any kind. What I have is far more profound.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A sense of humor.’

Jaz looked at him, trying to find a clue in his gaunt face, in the clear gray eyes watching him with such - what? Amusement? Condescension? There was something about the man which brought on a sort of hermeneutic despair. He was a forest of signs.

‘We’re hunting for jokes.’ Bachman spoke slowly, as if to a child. ‘Parapraxes. Cosmic slips of the tongue. They’re the key to the locked door. They’ll help us discover it.’

‘Discover what?’

‘The face of God. What else would we be looking for? "

― Hari Kunzru , Gods Without Men

2 " Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times. "

― Hari Kunzru , White Tears

3 " People always look aroused when they’re acting violently. "

― Hari Kunzru , White Tears

4 " I wanted to avoid slippage. "

― Hari Kunzru , White Tears

5 " There was, as she put it, nothing to stop me. So I followed the path of educated misfits through the ages and got a job in a bookshop. "

― Hari Kunzru , My Revolutions

6 " Legality is just the name for everything that's not dangerous for the ruling order. "

― Hari Kunzru , My Revolutions

7 " You're too old to be saying to me, as you did recently, that you weren't 'interested in politics'. You're lucky that politics feels optional, something it's safe to ignore. Most people in the world have it forced on them "

― Hari Kunzru , My Revolutions

8 " When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don't remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems in vain. You stow your bag, show your ticket, climb the steps. All the sinners climb aboard. "

― Hari Kunzru , White Tears

9 " My doctors were fundamentally servants of the status quo. Their work was predicated on the assumption that the world is bearable, and anyone who finds it otherwise should be coaxed or medicated into acceptance. But what if it isn’t? What if the reasonable reaction is endless horrified screaming? "

― Hari Kunzru , Red Pill

10 " Several times in my life I've gone through long periods without sex or any other kind of physical contact. The hunger it produces is deep and low; it's possible to lose track of it, to forget or fail to perceive how it's emptied everything out of you and made the world papery and thin. Touch starved, you brush against existence like a stick against dry leaves. You become insubstantial yourself, a hungry ghost. "

― Hari Kunzru , My Revolutions

11 " Now what I think of when I think of my “self” is the atrocious waste of my years. "

― Hari Kunzru , Red Pill

12 " All things are transitory. All things must pass. Attachments whether to material possessions, to people, to places to name, are futile. Despite your clinging, these things will fade away. "

― Hari Kunzru , My Revolutions

13 " She thought she was a feminist. She was only bad tempered. "

― Hari Kunzru , Transmission

14 " Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive. "

― Hari Kunzru , White Tears

15 " Plot is the artificial reduction of life’s complexity and randomness. It is a way to give aesthetic form to reality. "

― Hari Kunzru , Red Pill

16 " Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was patriotic. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on. "

― Hari Kunzru , Gods Without Men

17 " I THINK IT IS POSSIBLE to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have a sense of waking from sleep or being washed up onshore, newly conscious of your surroundings. So this is where I am, you say to yourself. This is what I have become. It is when you first understand that your condition—physically, intellectually, socially, financially—is not absolutely mutable, that what has already happened will, to a great extent, determine the rest of the story. What you have done cannot be undone, and much of what you have been putting off for “later” will never get done at all. In short, your time is a finite and dwindling resource. From this moment on, whatever you are doing, whatever joy or intensity or whirl of pleasure you may experience, you will never shake the almost-imperceptible sensation that you are traveling on a gentle downward slope into darkness. "

― Hari Kunzru , Red Pill

18 " What if the Reasonable Reaction to the World is Endless Horrified Screaming? "

― Hari Kunzru , Red Pill

19 " When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don’t remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems to be in vain. "

― Hari Kunzru , White Tears

20 " There is always more to New York. More than you’ve seen or care to see. "

― Hari Kunzru , White Tears