Ballard Quotes & Sayings

The man who's mad is at a disadvantage. The man who laughs can ride out anything. — W.T. Ballard

Now and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring in its sleep. — J.G. Ballard

Procreative power & priesthood power are shared by husband & wife — M. Russell Ballard

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. — J.G. Ballard

There is only one way by which the nations can be brought into unity and into peace and into brotherhood. This is not through guns, nor might, nor force, but through the power of God and the love of our fellowmen that is in the hearts of this people. — Melvin J. Ballard

Mrs Wilder stood passively with her tray, unaware of Royal fondling her, partly because she had been molested by so many men during the past months, but also because the sexual assault itself had ceased to have any meaning. — J.G. Ballard

In your morning prayer each new day, ask Heavenly Father to guide you to recognize an opportunity to serve one of His precious children. — M. Russell Ballard

Fifty percent of the United States of America is underneath the ocean. And we have better maps of Mars than those areas. — Robert Ballard

I think the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you. — J.G. Ballard

The love for work needs to be re-enthroned in our lives. Every family should have a plan for work that touches the life of each family member so that this eternal principle will be ingrained in their lives. — M. Russell Ballard

I'm a strong opponent of all religious belief.
... And supposedly 95% of Americans say they believe in God - that's worrying.
... Religions are Trojan horses which conceal profoundly strange psychopathy strains. There's no other explanation for them. The sheer fear of death has been the main engine of religions for a very long time. — J.G. Ballard

Remove any of your fear with faith. Trust the power of God to guide you. — M. Russell Ballard

I've always loved what I'd term 'dark fiction' writers, everyone from J. G. Ballard to Mervyn Peake and Philip Pullman. I'm not sure it's a genre, but it's what I like best. — Christopher Fowler

It is only when we love God and Christ with all of our hearts, souls, and minds that we are able to share this love with our neighbors through acts of kindness and service ... When this pure love of Christ-or charity-envelops us, we think, feel, and act more like Heavenly Father and Jesus would think, feel, and act. Our motivation and heartfelt desire are like unto that of the Savior. — M. Russell Ballard

He had entered an endless subterranean cavern, where jeweled rocks loomed out of the spectral gloom like marine plants, the sprays of glass forming white fountains. Several times he crossed and recrossed the road. The spurs were almost waist-high, and he was forced to climb over the brittle stems. Once, as he rested against the trunk of a bifurcated oak, an immense multi-colored bird erupted from a bough over his head, and flew off with a wild screech, aureoles of light cascading from its red and yellow wings. At last the storm subsided, and a pale light filtered through the stained-glass canopy. Again, the forest was a place of rainbows, a deep, iridescent light glowing from within. — J.G. Ballard

The Internet is an amazing development. — J.G. Ballard

There is no problem in the family, ward, or stake that cannot be solved if we look for solutions in the Lord's way by counseling - really counseling - with one another. — M. Russell Ballard

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

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace. — J.G. Ballard

Be impatient. All things don't come to those who wait. Push on with what you believe because life is very short. — Geoffrey Ballard

And when a futurist dies, the tragedy is that we lose access to all the possible futures they imagined for us. Our only connection, afterward, is through the arcane procedure like literary interpretation, like reading the flight of birds or throwing the I Ching, as Ballard must have as a child in Shanghai. Like it or not, we live in one of Ballard's futures; a little apocalyptic, bent by technology. — William Ball

We need to let our family and our friends know this truth - God is love, and he inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him. - 2 Nephi 26:33 — M. Russell Ballard

I was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China. I was there in Shanghai when, the morning after Pearl Harbor, they seized Shanghai. — J.G. Ballard

After Freud's exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised — J.G. Ballard

It's not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea. — Robert Ballard

Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes. — J.G. Ballard

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means. — J.G. Ballard

We have taken a giant step forward in correcting some of the misconceptions people have about the church. I think that we've made a lot of friends. — M. Russell Ballard

She was as different from her dazzling sister as night was to day. Ballard found it difficult to look at the younger girl for more than a moment at a time. Beauty such as hers blinded him, like looking directly at the sun. Louvaen though--he could happily drown in the dark Louvaen. — Grace Draven

The run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or more ambiguously recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways — J.G. Ballard

I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas. — J.G. Ballard

There are signs, I think, that people aren't satisfied by consumerism: that people resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour their next car will be. — J.G. Ballard

On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city. — J.G. Ballard

What's been happening?"
"Nothing... It's already happened — J.G. Ballard

Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need. — J.G. Ballard

This isn't just a shopping mall. It's more like ... "
"A religious experience?"
"Exactly! It's like going to church ... — J.G. Ballard

Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger dividend for themselves. — J.G. Ballard

There is no other relationship quite like that which can and should exist between a boy and his dad. It can be one of the most nurturing, joyful relationships in life, one that can have a profound impact on who boys become and also on who dads become. — M. Russell Ballard

The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it. — J.G. Ballard

When you understand the Atonement, then you understand the joy of being rescued. — M. Russell Ballard

Sooner or later, everything turns into television. — J.G. Ballard

Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance. — J.G. Ballard

'What was being on the moon literally like?' [ ... ] 'Being on the moon?' His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. 'It was just like being here.' — J.G. Ballard

Sex x Technology = the Future. — J.G. Ballard

... We never will have balance in our lives unless our finances are securely under control. — M. Russell Ballard

One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is alright. — J.G. Ballard

Great things are brought about and burdens are lightened through the efforts of many hands anxiously engaged in a good cause. — M. Russell Ballard

You are unique. You are the only one in all of God's creation with your set of fingerprints--and your set of pain and experiences. You are special, and you are rare. The way the people in your life have treated you is absolutely no reflection of your value. It is only a reflection of their own pain and misery.

Remember, it doesn't matter where you've been--only where you're going. Because life isn't what you get--it's what you give!! — Darlene Ballard

The DEEP SEA has more history in it than all the museums of the world-combined. — Robert Ballard

Everywhere
all over Africa and South America ... you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul ... This is the prison this planet is being turned into. — J.G. Ballard

The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit. — J.G. Ballard

It was an excess of fantasy that killed the old United States, the whole Mickey Mouse and Marilyn thing, the most brilliant technologies devoted to trivia like instant cameras and space spectaculars that should have stayed in the pages of Science Fiction ... some of the last Presidents of the U.S.A. seemed to have been recruited straight from Disneyland. — J.G. Ballard

Because we love the Lord, we should be spiritually sensitive to moments when the powerful and important truths of the gospel can be shared with others. Perhaps more importantly, however, we should seek at all times to purify ourselves and to lead such worthy lives that the Light of Christ emanates from us in all that we say and do. Our day-to-day lives should stand as immutable witness of our faith in Christ. — M. Russell Ballard

Through the window I looked across the oil-black Tigris at the Green Zone, lit up like Disneyland in Dystopia. I thought about J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise, where a state-of-the-art London tower block is the vertical stage for civilization to unpeel itself until nothing but primal violence remains. — David Mitchell

The important questions focus on what matters most-Heavenly Father's plan and the Savior's Atonement. — M. Russell Ballard

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it. — J.G. Ballard

The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates the inhabitants of the marketing zones in the consumer society, television audiences and news magazine readerships, who vote with money at the cash counter rather than with ballot paper at the polling boot. These huge and passive electorates are wide open to any opportunist using the psychological weaponry of fear and anxiety, elements that are carefully blanched out of the world of domestic products and consumer software. — J.G. Ballard

The crystal trees among them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead. The process of crystallization was more advanced. The fences along the road were so encrusted that they formed a continuous palisade, a white frost at least six inches thick on either side of the palings. The few houses between the trees glistened like wedding cakes, white roofs and chimneys transformed into exotic miniarets and baroque domes. On a law of green glass spurs, a child's tricycle gleamed like a Faberge gem, the wheels starred into brilliant jasper crowns. — J.G. Ballard

Actually, the suburbs are far more sinister places than most city dwellers imagine. Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas. I mean, one's got to get up in the morning thinking of a deviant act, merely to make certain of one's freedom. It needn't be much; kicking the dog will do. — J.G. Ballard

If we really feared the crash, most of us would be unable to look at a car, let lone drive one. — J.G. Ballard

There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers. — Robert Ballard

A ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury. — J.G. Ballard

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. — J.G. Ballard

I mean, technology is amoral. It has no morality. — Robert Ballard

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence. — J.G. Ballard

The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime. — J.G. Ballard

There is no such thing as unlawful censorship in the home. Movies, magazines, television, videos, the Internet, and other media are there as guests and should only be welcomed when they are appropriate for family enjoyment. — M. Russell Ballard

I'm not laughing, and I'm not running. I wont lie either. You're a chilling sight to behold. I've had nightmares of monsters prettier than you." She stepped closer and raised her other hand to thread her fingers through his hair. This time he didn't flinch away. "But you're still you under all this flux nonsense. Only a fool of a woman would run from such an extraordinary man, and I am no fool, Ballard de Sauveterre. — Grace Draven

Miriam - I'll give you any flowers you want!' Rhapsodising over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: 'I'll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair ... !'
'And in my heart?'
'In your womb I'll set a fly-trap! — J.G. Ballard

Just as He had done with David, Samuel, and Joseph of the Old Testament, God took an innocent, unlearned boy, one still unsullied by the world and pliable to His divine will, and molded and shaped him into His chosen prophet. — M. Russell Ballard

The love that exists between people who share religious values and experiences can be the most satisfying and unifying force this side of the solid, happy family. — M. Russell Ballard

Free and open expression coupled with visionary leadership generally encourages good decision-making. — M. Russell Ballard

There is a big difference between an honest mistake made in a moment of spiritual weakness and a willfull decision to disobey persistently the commandments of God. Those who deliberately choose to violate God's commandments or ignore the standards of the Church, even when promising themselves and others that someday they will be strong enough to repent, are stepping into a dangerously slippery slope upon which many have lost their spiritual footing. — M. Russell Ballard

Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating. — J.G. Ballard

At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as pedophilia and sodomy will become derided cliches, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls. — J.G. Ballard

We can all be more consistently involved in missionary work by replacing our fear with real faith. — M. Russell Ballard

I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. — J.G. Ballard

In his ... 'Geometrical peculiarities of the Pyramids', Ballard shows the relationship between the equal area theory and the golden number. After checking Herodotus' statement via dimensions Ballard concludes: 'I have therefore the authority of Herodotus to support the theory which I shall subsequently set forth, that this pyramid was the exponent of lines divided in mean and extreme ratio. — Roger Herz-Fischler

When he had first met her, Royal had taken for granted her absolute self-confidence, but in fact the reverse was true - far from being sure of herself, Anne needed constantly to re-establish her position on the top rung of the ladder. By comparison, the professional people around her, who had achieved everything as a result of their own talents, were models of self-assurance — J.G. Ballard

But a lottery isn't meaningless. Someone has to win. — J.G. Ballard

The advanced societies of the future will not be governed by reason. They will be driven by irrationality, by competing systems of psychopathology. — J.G. Ballard

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. — J.G. Ballard

The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematizing the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray's Anatomy. — J.G. Ballard

To the Insane: I owe them everything. — J.G. Ballard

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct. — J.G. Ballard

Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people's lives you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture. — J.G. Ballard

A postcard and I'm pining for New England. . . — Amy Ballard

The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts. — J.G. Ballard

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen. — J.G. Ballard

Consciousness is the central nervous system's gamble that it exists ... — J.G. Ballard

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant. — J.G. Ballard

A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. — J.G. Ballard

Fiction is a branch of neurology — J.G. Ballard

Madness--that's all they have, after working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Going mad is their only way of staying sane. — J.G. Ballard

Nothing endures for so long as fear. Everywhere in nature one sees evidence of innate releasing mechanisms literally millions of years old, which have lain dormant through thousands of generations but retained their power undiminished. The field rat's inherited image of the hawk's silhouette is the classic example - even a paper silhouette drawn across a cage sends it rushing frantically for cover. And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet's dominant life form. — J.G. Ballard

Of this you may be certain: The Lord especially loves righteous women-women who are not only faithful but filled with faith, women who are optimistic and cheerful because they know who they are and where they are going, women who are striving to live and serve as women of God. — M. Russell Ballard

Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse ... — J.G. Ballard

He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time. The — J.G. Ballard

Mr. Ballard, there's nothing in the world I wouldn't do to have my husband proved innocent. I know he's innocent. He begged me to ask you to help him. He said you were the toughest man he'd ever met, and that you tried to be honest with him, and that if you ever made up your mind to do something, nothing in the world could ever stop you." I — Harry Whittington

For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair. — J.G. Ballard