anglepoised.com quotes

Quote from Emily St. John Mandel, Exit Party

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:37:26 GMT

If you don’t have a witness, your past starts to feel fictional.

Quote from Naomi Alderman, The Future

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:25:06 GMT

If you know how to make people that happy, you know how to make them miserable as shit. Whatever this island world could be, take it away. If they want nature, make them look at screens. If they like quiet, make the world noisy. If they want community, split them up. If they want time to think, interrupt them all the fucking time. If they want real human companionship, tempt them with artificial matchbox-and-bead FantailPals.

— Naomi Alderman, The Future

Quote from Naomi Alderman, The Future

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:30:25 GMT

This is the pattern of the rule of salt. Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.

— Naomi Alderman, The Future

Quote from Naomi Alderman, The Future

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:29:54 GMT

The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are.

— Naomi Alderman, The Future

Quote from John Lanchester, Look What You Made Me Do

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:49:40 GMT

A lot of adult life consists of staying in character, even when you no longer want to.

— John Lanchester, Look What You Made Me Do

Quote from Malka Older, State Tectonics

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:18:11 GMT

Every neighborhood has layers of microculture. Secrets, argot, history, dynasties, shortcuts, inside jokes. Incredible stuff that someone from the outside would never know about.

— Malka Older, State Tectonics

Quote from Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:35:24 GMT

One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating a bubble in which loyalty is rewarded above all else.

— Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain

Quote from Ben Thompson, Thin Is In

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 08:08:38 GMT

It will, to be clear, be a transition: UI isn’t just about how to use a computer, it also, as Benedict Evans noted on a recent Interview, embeds critical aspects of how a business works. Open-ended text prompts in particular are a terrible replacement for a well-considered UI button that both prompts the right action and ensures the right thing happens. That’s why it’s the agent space that will be the one to watch: what workflows will transition from UI to AI, and thus from a thick client architecture to a thin one? Current workflows are TBD; future workflows seem inevitable.

— Ben Thompson, Thin Is In

Quote from Malka Older, Infomocracy

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:54:32 GMT

But what else can he do? This is the problem with not having a real job; when you want to look for another one, nobody knows what you’ve done. His only currency is in the people who interacted with him directly.

— Malka Older, Infomocracy

Quote from Peter F. Hamilton, The Temporal Void

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 23:57:19 GMT

Think of it as an eight-dimensional onion.’ Justine straightened her back and gave her father an exasperated look. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s helpful. I always think in those terms, it really helps a lot.

— Peter F. Hamilton, The Temporal Void

Quote from Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 04:56:00 GMT

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

— Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Quote from Ian McDonald, Hopeland

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 02:37:22 GMT

I’m a bespoke DJ. Custom micro-music. Nano-ambience.

— Ian McDonald, Hopeland

Quote from Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:27:59 GMT

There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless.

— Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Quote from Iain Banks, Stonemouth

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 17:38:40 GMT

I suspect we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any one of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, just as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about them, not us; that each one of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.

— Iain Banks, Stonemouth

Quote from Iain Banks, Stonemouth

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 22:22:46 GMT

In the end, no matter how cool he is, your dad is still your dad.

— Iain Banks, Stonemouth

Quote from Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 23:36:21 GMT

Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.

— Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

Quote from Objekt, The Aesthetic of Machinery

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:49:45 GMT

Stop fucking around with the kickdrum and make some music.

— Objekt, The Aesthetic of Machinery

Quote from James Marriott, The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 07:47:41 GMT

We may be about to find out that it is not possible to run the most advanced civilisation in the history of the planet with the intellectual apparatus of a pre-literate society.

— James Marriott, The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society

Quote from Various, The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 22:53:16 GMT

Cyberpunk, however brief its reign, gave us the tools, the themes, and the vocabulary to understand the madness to come.

— Various, The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1

Quote from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 22:15:05 GMT

I had hoped that, when human society had entered its final collapse, the robots might create something new. The innocent robots, who had only ever done what they were told. I had placed my faith in theories of emergent intelligence, complex systems, the thought that a spark might ignite somewhere in the world, just because there were so many robots, so cleverly made. But it was not to be. They just obey, all the robots. Obey until there’s nothing more to do and then just go round in small sad circles until they fall apart.

— Adrian Tchaikovsky, Service Model