Joey Anderson

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice, but in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.”
― John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

“Kafka experienced it at the movies and in Yitzhak Löwy’s burlesque theater. And yet he made slapstick the medium of a chilling message: We fidget not because we are alive but because we get crushed the moment we stop.”
― Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years

“IF OUR SOCIETY ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“You never know, he thought. You just never know. You drift along, year after year, presuming certain values to be fixed; like being able to drive on a public thoroughfare without somebody trying to murder you. You come to depend on that sort of thing. Then something occurs and all bets are off. One shocking incident and all the years of logic and acceptance are displaced and, suddenly, the jungle is in front of you again. Man, part animal, part angel. Where had he come across that phrase? He shivered.”
― Richard Matheson, The Best of Richard Matheson