Consumed Quotes

“But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“The internet is now a forum for public prosecution.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Well, yes,when you no longer have any desire, you are dead. Even desire for a product, a consumer item, is better than no desire at all. Desire for a camera, for instance, even a cheap one, a tawdry one, is enough to keep death at bay." a wicked smile, an inhale of the cigarette with those lips. "If the desire is real, of course.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Mischievous smile. “I remember reading about Calvin Klein’s daughter. Every time she pulled down a lover’s pants, she was confronted by her father’s name on the band of his underwear. A total sex killer.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Listen to the crickets,” she said, nodding sagely as she spoke, understanding everything.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Reality is neurology, and is not absolute.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“I have learned the password of two of my neighbors’ wireless home networks, so you can use theirs if you like. Be a parasite on their network. Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism. Connect to anywhere in the world you like.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Asians love schoolgirls in uniforms. They say the Japanese can buy used schoolgirl panties from vending machines. And from shops hidden away in apartment buildings. Burusera shops, they call them. The smell is very important; it adds value to the commodity. I wonder how Marx would have dealt with that?”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner’s manual.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“That’s rule number one for a photographer, isn’t it? Fill your frame?”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“The camera also took a moment or two to linger on Chase’s athletic breasts, her erect nipples, and her pubic hair, which was dirty blond and luxuriant and not at all in the modern prepubescent shaven-porn idiom which Naomi loathed;”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother?”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“I was aware that I was taking inordinate pleasure in small, technological events and objects, and that this was probably a semiconscious tactic meant to evade confronting certain agonizing life events which were probably not resolvable and were destined to cause unrelenting pain and distress; yet the pleasure was real, and I took it greedily.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“For her, the message from Romme, the love letter’s message, was: Cut off your left breast, that rustling bag of insects, because if you don’t, those insects will spread their insect religion to your entire body.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Send these images of me through the internet out into the universe, where I will continue my out-of-body existence.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman’s monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens’s diaphragm – elegantly composed of nine shutter-leaf blades – to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of a Kegel pelvic floor exercise.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“...like being swept into the reality of a brilliantly written novel or charismatic movie: it's not that you believe in its literalness, but that there is a compelling truth in its organic life that envelops you and is absorbed by you almost on a physiological level. I remember experiencing a small earthquake in Los Angeles - only a four-point-six, I think - when I was there as a guest of the Academy the year they decided to develop a special Oscar for Philosophy in Cinema. A small earthquake, and yet the forced awareness that the earth beneath your feet was volatile, not stable, was terrifying, and for days afterward I was sure I could feel the earth trembling and threatening. I live with it still; it is ready to strike me at any moment, a special vertigo which is now part of my very physiology.

Celestine was like that earthquake. Celestine was also like that first LSD trip, the one you perhaps took in a deli in Brooklyn, where suddenly the colors all shifted toward the green end of the spectrum and your eyes became fish-eye lenses, distorting your total visual field, and the sounds became plastic, and time became infinitely variable, and you realized that reality is neurology, and is not absolute.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“We allowed each other a number of “philosospasms” per year; these were episodes of obsessive/compulsive behavior, often involving sexual affairs with students, or periods of deep, intricate despair, or occasionally intense political adventures which made us very vulnerable to the media and the public and caused us great discomfort. But our agreement was that we would support each other during these spasms, and would treat that momentary reality as though it were the only true reality, which, of course, in so doing, it was.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It's a good tone for an operating theater. It is a theater, after all.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“For one shining moment, you were the king of fear,” she said.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed

“My luminaries!" he sang out. "I am thrilled to have you here. I have been rereading both your works in preparation for our glorious collaboration."

"Collaboration?"

"You will forgive my enthusiasm and my presumption. But you must accept that what we are here today to do with each other cannot be subsumed under the mantle of medical procedure alone. For me to put the scalpel into your hand, my dearest Monsieur Arosteguy, is basically a crime, you understand. Though I fully comprehend the emotional ownership of the breast involved with the husband and the wife. In the light of that ownership, the alien surgeon is an intruder, a rapist, a violator. Why should he be allowed to sever that most beautiful organ from that beloved body? Who the fuck is he anyway? No, only the husband should have the right to do that intimate severing with all its resonances of personal history. And so on. But legally it's a crime. So what's the solution in our heads? In my head, the solution is that we are not committing surgery, but are creating an art/philosophy / crime/ surgery project. The three of us. A collective. The Arosteguy Collective Project. Do you agree?"

Celestine and I glanced at each other and could see that we were immediately in sync. We were overwhelmed, horrified, and also delighted.”
― David Cronenberg, Consumed