Matthew De Abaitua Quotes & Sayings

Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking. — Matthew De Abaitua

I want you to know, Ruth, that it was impossible to survive our time without doing wrong. It was an evil age. If we had lived in a better time, then we would have been better people. — Matthew De Abaitua

Who desired the Great War? No nation benefitted from it. The war brought about the destruction of the Prussian Empire, stripped the British Empire of its ability to hold its colonies, slaughtered the French and starved Germany, inspired a revolution in Russia, and prepared the ground for a more terrible slaughter to come. The great powers didn't want a war and they certainly didn't need one. But their people wanted a war. To the surprise of the rulers across the Allies and the Central Powers, the idea of war was seized by the people of every nation. — Matthew De Abaitua

He was smoking his joint now, and it was having no effect upon him. — Matthew De Abaitua

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes. — Matthew De Abaitua

Losing him would, she realised, be unlike anything she had ever experienced before. A marriage is a conspiracy, a shared aspect toward the rest of the society, a code devised over a long history of negotiation and habit. That code would vanish. Her thoughts would be unobserved, her memories would be hers alone, without the heft that comes from sharing them with another. She would become insubstantial to herself. — Matthew De Abaitua

Female status in Pre-Seizure culture was predicated on appetite control. But a woman in control of her desire did not function economically, and so loops were inserted into culture to accelerate female bonding in acts of over-consumption that defied restraint. These loops gave permission for loss of control. He loved the paradoxes of Pre-Seizure culture: on the one hand, building up an iconicity of self-control around images of thinness and athletic discipline, and on the other, unpicking that self-control to create necessary doubt and need. It must have been maddening to live through. — Matthew De Abaitua

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire. — Matthew De Abaitua

A talent for forgetting is necessary to maintain civility. — Matthew De Abaitua

Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on. — Matthew De Abaitua

Kindness is not entered onto the great ledger of civilisation. — Matthew De Abaitua

I'm not afraid of anything and I will not fight. — Matthew De Abaitua

Selling out had never been a problem before because no one had wanted to buy. Why are we kneecapping ourselves with artistic principles when we are yet to produce any art? — Matthew De Abaitua

A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech," said Theodore. "Their employers would have required it." Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion. "This is the hearth," he said. "The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being." He squinted at the screen. "Can you bring this into resolution? — Matthew De Abaitua

It is in his obsessions that mankind most closely resembles his machines. — Matthew De Abaitua

Her self lagged behind her anger, like a mother picking up after a destructive child. — Matthew De Abaitua

If you said to me, "I do not love, I have never loved," then you would sound incomplete. Equally, if you say "I do not hate, I have never hated," then you sound like half a man. — Matthew De Abaitua