Feed Mt Anderson Quotes

The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.

There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.

…It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.

You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.

Then it was this big thing. She was like, 'I never want to see you again', and I was like, 'Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.

My idea of life, it's what happens when they're rolling the credits.

I am messaging you to say that I love you, and that you're completely wrong about me thinking you're stupid. I always thought you could teach me things. I was always waiting. You're not like the others. You say things that no one expects you to. You think you're stupid. You want to be stupid. But you're someone people could learn from.

I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.

We enter a time of calamity. Blood on the tarmac. Fingers in the juicer. Towers of air frozen in the lunar wastes. Models dead on the runways, with their legs facing backward. Children with smiles that can’t be undone. Chicken shall rot in the aisles. See the pillars fall.

I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.

Maybe these are our salad days." "Huh?" "You know. Happy." "What's happy about a salad?" She shrugged. "Ranch," she said.

I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.

It’s the end. It’s the end of the civilization. We’re going down. No, it’s sure not too attractive. Lenticels. I just hope my kids don’t live to see the last days. The things burning and people living in cellars. Violet. The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.

it's like a squid in love with the sky.

I looked over at her face. I could see the light from my heartbeat on her tears.

Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.

I could see my face, crying, in her blank eye.

Image of a girl holding a blaster to a twin’s temple. “Remember, bi***. You can’t spell ‘danger’ without DNA.” Blam.

I miss that time. The cities back then, just after the forests died, were full of wonders, and you'd stumble on them--these princes of the air on common rooftops--the rivers that burst through the city streets so they ran like canals--the rabbits in parking garages--the deer foaling, nestled in Dumpsters like a Nativity.

It felt good, really good, just to scream finally. I felt like I was singing a hit single. But in Hell.

We are the nation of dreams. We are seers. We are wizards. We speak in visions. Our letters are like flocks of doves, released from under our hats. We have only to stretch out our hand and desire, and what we wish for settles like a kerchief in our palm. We are a race of sorcerers, enchanters. We are Atlantis. We are the wizard-isle of Mu.

I wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, “Ow.

You’re one funny enchilada,

…what the President meant in the intercepted chat. This was, uh, nothing but a routine translation problem. It has to be understood, that…It has to be understood that when the President referred to the Prime Minister of the Global Alliance as a ‘big sh*thead,’ what he was trying to convey was, uh—this is an American idiom used to praise people, by referring to the sheer fertilizing power of their thoughts. The President meant to say that the Prime Minister’s head was fertile, just full of these nutrients where ideas can grow. It really was a compliment…

It makes good times even better when you know they are going to end. Like grilled vegetables are better because some of them are partly soot.

The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements.

So one time I said to her that she should stop reading it, because it was just depressing, so she was like, But I want to know what’s going on, so I was like, Then you should do something about it. It’s a free country. You should do something. She was like, Nothing’s ever going to happen in a two-party system. She was like, da da da, nothing’s ever going to change, both parties are in the pocket of big business, da da da, all that? So I was like, You got to believe in the people, it’s a democracy, we can change things. She was like, It’s not a democracy.

I cried, sitting by her bed, and I told her the story of us. “It’s about the feed,” I said. “It’s about this meg normal guy, who doesn’t think about anything until one wacky day, when he meets a dissident with a heart of gold.” I said, “Set against the backdrop of America in its final days, it’s the high-spirited story of their love together, it’s laugh-out-loud funny, really heartwarming, and a visual feast.” I picked up her hand and held it to my lips. I whispered to her fingers. “Together, the two crazy kids grow, have madcap escapades, and learn an important lesson about love. They learn to resist the feed. Rated PG-13. For language,” I whispered, “and mild sexual situations.

where we could see the stars. “Whoa,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?” “It’s like . . . ,” I said. “It’s like a squid in love with the sky.

I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it's like some kind of brain surgery...

Other people just have fun. They have fun, and it comes naturally to them.

when I think of really living, living to the full — all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms.

was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

I don’t know. D’you think? He’s pretty wide in the chest.” The girl looked at me, and I was frozen. So I said, “Yeah. I work out.” Violet asked me, “What are you? What’s your cup size?” I shrugged and played along. “Like, nine and a half?” I guessed. “That’s my shoe size.” Violet said, “I think he’d like something slinky, kind of silky.” I said, “As long as you can stop me from rubbing myself up against a wall the whole time.” “Okay,” said Violet, holding her hands up like she was annoyed. “Okay, the chemise last week was a mistake.

We got some that were plain and some cinnamon. I liked the cinnamon better. Violet said that it was important to start with the plain, so that the cinnamon seemed more like a change. She said she had a theory that everything was better if you delayed it. She had this whole thing about self-control, okay, and the importance of self-control.

No one with feeds thinks about it," she said. "When you have the feed all your life, you're brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it's a republic and not a democracy. It's something that makes me angry, what people don't know about these days. Because of the feed, we're raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.

We Americans,” he said, “are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them” — he pointed at his daughter — “what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we would see all the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.

School™ is not so bad now, not like back when my grandparents were kids, when the schools were run by the government, which sounds completely like, Nazi, to have the government running the schools? Back then, it was big boring, and all the kids were meg null, because they didn’t learn anything useful, it was all like, da da da da, this happened in fourteen ninety-two, da da da da, when you mix like, chalk and water, it makes nitroglycerin, and that kind of shit? And nothing was useful?

With a hologram, like when your teacher is one of them, if you aren’t looking right at them, they sometimes seem to be hollow. You see them and suddenly they don’t have a face that pokes out. Their faces poke in, their nose and so on, and there is nothing inside them. If you don’t look right at them, they can look just like an empty shell.

It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.

I came into the world alone.” She picked up her shoe and scratched the crust out of the tread. She said, “I didn’t want to go out of it alone.

He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says.

The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.

I could still smell the hospital in my nose. It wasn’t anything around me. It was her. I stopped breathing, but the smell was still there. I held my breath.

It was a strange moment, like when you get sad after sex, and it feels like it's too late in the afternoon, even if it's morning, or night, and you turn away from the other person, and they turn away from you, and you lie there, and when you turn back towards them you can both see each other's moles. Usually there seem to shadows from Venetian blinds all across your legs.

When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.

That’s one of the great things about the feed—that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.

They’re all sitcom openers.” “What?” “Everything I think of when I think of really living, living to the full – all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms. See what I mean? My idea of life, it’s what happens when they’re rolling the credits. My god. What am I, without the feed? It’s all from the feed credits. My idea of real life.

I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could. I told her that the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met. I told her that the Emperor Nero, from Rome, had a giant sea built where he could keep sea monsters and have naval battles staged for him. I told her that there had been rioting in malls all over America, and that no one knew why. I told her that the red-suited Santa Claus we know — the regular one? — was popularized by the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. I told her that the White House had not confirmed or denied reports that extensive bombing had started in major cities in South America. I told her, “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all these miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef and the birds and the sky, it glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.

That’s one of the great things about the feed — that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit. It’s more now, it’s not so much about the educational stuff but more regarding the fact that everything that goes on, goes on on the feed.

I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it's like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. except with talking, it's more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, and maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you're touching around in the brain, But the patient, she keeps jumping and saying ow.

And I whispered, “Violet…Violet? There’s one story I’ll keep telling you. I’ll keep telling it. You’re the story. I don’t want you to forget. When you wake up, I want you to remember yourself. I’m going to remember. You’re still there, as long as I can remember you. As long as someone knows you. I know you so well, I could drive a simulator. This is the story.” And for the first time, I started crying. I cried, sitting by her bed, and I told her the story of us.

. . . First, in the deserts and veldts arose oral culture, the culture of the spoken word. Then in the cities with their temples and bazaars came the pictographs, and later, symbols that produced sounds as if by magic, and what followed was written culture. Then, in the universities and under the steeples of young nations, print culture. These—oral culture, written culture, the culture of print—these have always been considered the great epochs of man. But we have entered a new age. We are a new people. It is now the age of oneiric culture, the culture of dreams. And we are the nation of dreams. We are seers. We are wizards. We speak in visions. Our letters are like flocks of doves, released from under our hats. We have only to stretch out our hand and desire, and what we wish for settles like a kerchief in our palm. We are a race of sorcerers, enchanters. We are Atlantis. We are the wizard-isle of Mu. What we wish for, is ours. It is the age of oneiric culture. And we, America, we are the nation of dreams.

One day, many years after the siege was lifted and the war was over, two nutritionists met by chance. They introduced themselves. One, Alexei Bezzubov, had worked at Leningrad’s Vitamin Institute, seeking out new sources of protein for the hungry. The other, as it turned out, was Ernst Ziegelmeyer, deputy quartermaster of Hitler’s army, the man who’d been assigned to calculate how quickly Leningrad would fall without food deliveries. Now these two men met in peace: the one who had tried to starve a city, and the other who had tried to feed it. Ziegelmeyer pressed Bezzubov incredulously: “However did you hold out? How could you? It’s quite impossible! I wrote a deposition that it was physically impossible to live on such a ration.” Bezzubov could not provide a scientific, purely nutritive answer. There was none. Instead, he “talked of faith in victory, of the spiritual reserves of Leningraders, which had not been accounted for in the German professor’s

Sometimes that made me feel kind of tired. It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it. I felt like I’d been running toward it for a long time.

. . First, in the deserts and veldts arose oral culture, the culture of the spoken word. Then in the cities with their temples and bazaars came the pictographs, and later, symbols that produced sounds as if by magic, and what followed was written culture. Then, in the universities and under the steeples of young nations, print culture. These—oral culture, written culture, the culture of print—these have always been considered the great epochs of man. But we have entered a new age. We are a new people. It is now the age of oneiric culture, the culture of dreams. And we are the nation of dreams. We are seers. We are wizards. We speak in visions. Our letters are like flocks of doves, released from under our hats. We have only to stretch out our hand and desire, and what we wish for settles like a kerchief in our palm. We are a race of sorcerers, enchanters. We are Atlantis. We are the wizard-isle of Mu. What we wish for, is ours. It is the age of oneiric culture. And we, America, we are the nation of dreams.

We Americans,” he said, “are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them”—he pointed at his daughter—“what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.

We’re sorry, Violet Durn. Unfortunately, FeedTech and other investors reviewed your purchasing history, and we don’t feel that you would be a reliable investment at this time. No one could get what we call a “handle” on your shopping habits, like for example you asking for information about all those wow and brag products and then never buying anything. We have to inform you that our corporate investors were like, “What’s doing with this?” Sorry – I’m afraid you’ll just have to work with your feed the way it is.

Then later there was this thing that hit hipsters. People were just stopping in their tracks frozen. At first, people thought it was another virus, and they were looking for groups like the Coalition of Pity, but it turned out that it was something called Nostalgia Feedback. People had been getting nostalgia for fashions that were closer and closer to their own time, until finally people became nostalgic for the moment they were actually living in, and the feedback completely froze them. We were real worried about them for a day or so.

Spreading out from me, in the dead of the night, I could feel credit deducted, and the warehouse alerted, and packing, I could feel the packing, and the shipment, the distribution, the transition to FedEx, the numbers, each time, the order number, my customer number traded like secret words at a border, and the things all went out, and I could feel them coming to me as the night passed. I could feel them in orbit. I could feel them in circulation all around me like blood in my veins. I had no credit. I had nothing left in my account.

We are all suspended in a sphere of imagery and voices vying for attention. How do we know that what’s going on is actually in our best interest? How can we be sure that our way of life will be preserved for the future? And do we really want it to be?

People have told me that Feed is coming true. (Many of the technologies I discussed have been explored in recent years.) But in a sense, I believe it already was the reality when I was writing. I was already dreaming in advertisements.

Everything we do gets thrown into a big calculation. Like they’re watching us right now. They can tell where you’re looking. They want to know what you want. ...Everything we’ve grown up with—the stories on the feed, the games, all of that—it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to. I mean, they do these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you’re supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing.

I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.

I can never keep any of the riots straight. Which one was the Watts riot?” Calista and Loga stopped and looked at her. I could feel them flashing chat. “Like, a riot,” said Calista. “I don’t know, Violet. Like, when people start breaking windows and beating each other up, and they have to call in the cops. A riot. You know. Riot?

School™ is not so bad now, not like back when my grandparents were kids, when the schools were run by the government, which sounds completely like, Nazi, to have the government running the schools?

Her slippers went fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik, on the floors. They were soft sounds, like the sounds mouths make when they open and close.

It's times like this that I'm real glad I have friends. They say friends are worth your weight in gold.

When we got there, Calista and Loga were getting out of Calista's car, and it was like, Whoa, because they were wearing all torn-up clothes. They were walking normal but they looked like they'd been burned up and hit with stuff. I ran over to them. I was going, 'Holy shit! Are you okay? What happened?' and Violet, too, she was going, "Hey--are you okay?' They stood there and looked at us, then looked at each other, like 'Ohmigod! Someone is a poopiehead! 'Yuh,' said Loga. 'It's Riot Gear. It's retro. It's beat up to look like one of the big twentieth-century riots. It's been big since earlier this week.' I was like, 'Oh.' Violet was like, 'Sorry.' 'No wrong,' said Calista, flipping her hair. When we went inside, Marty and Quendy were also wearing Riot Gear. Everyone was going Hi! Hey! Hey! Hi! Unit! What's doing? 'Hey!' said Loga to Quendy, pointing, 'Kent State collection, right? Great skirt!

First, in the deserts and veldts arose oral culture, the culture of the spoken word. Then in the cities with their temples and bazaars came the pictographs, and later, symbols that produced sounds as if by magic, and what followed was written culture. Then, in the universities and under the steeples of young nations, print culture. These—oral culture, written culture, the culture of print—these have always been considered the great epochs of man. But we have entered a new age. We are a new people. It is now the age of oneiric culture, the culture of dreams.

I want to do the things that show you’re alive. I want to eat huge meals with wine. I want to go to the zoo with you.

I won’t remember you standing there bored by my bedside as I slur words, standing there waiting to feel like you’ve stayed long enough so that you’re a good person and you’re allowed to leave.

When we were eating dinner, sitting on her bed side by side, she said to me, “This is fun.” “It weirdly is,” I said. “Maybe these are our salad days.” “Huh?” “You know. Happy.” “What’s happy about a salad?” She shrugged. “Ranch,” she said.

People want to forget. You can’t blame them.

He was glaring at me. “I’m sorry,” I said. He asked, “For what?” “For what I did.” “What about what you didn’t do?

Titus, I’m afraid of silence.

I was like, Then what is it? A republic. It’s a republic. Why? Because we elect people to vote for us. That’s my point. So why is it like that? Because if it was a democracy, everybody would have to decide about everything. I thought about that. We could have everybody vote. From the feeds. Instantaneous. Then it would be a democracy.

Almost nothing lives here anymore, except where we plant it? No. No, no, no. We don’t know any of that. We have tea parties with our teddies. We go sledding. We enjoy being young. We take what’s coming to us. That’s our way.

I’ll breathe in whatever face I want to breathe in.

not the quickest bunny in the centrifuge?

Violeta... ¿Violeta? Hay una historia que te voy a seguir contando. Voy a seguir contándotela. Tú eres esa historia. No quiero que olvides. Cuando despiertes, quiero que te recuerdes. Yo voy a acordarme. Existes mientras te recuerde. Mientras alguien te conozca. Yo te conozco tan bien que podría manejar un simulador. Ésta es la historia.

A nosotros los estadounidenses, lo único que nos interesa es el consumo de nuestros productos. No nos interesa cómo los fabrican o qué les pasa, lo que pasa cuando los desechamos, cuando los tiramos a la basura.

Pero siempre hay tiempo de cambiar. Siempre hay tiempo. Hasta que ya no hay.