Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that all events in our lives are interconnected and intentional, rather than random occurrences.
J. G. Ballard's quote emphasizes the idea that the events and experiences we encounter are not merely accidental; instead, they are deep, meaningful assignments that shape our lives and destinies. By stating that there are no coincidences, Ballard invites us to reflect on the significant connections and patterns in our lives, implying that every experience contributes to our personal narrative and growth.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding purpose in life.
Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
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.
I'm tired of saying, "How wonderful you are!" to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it.
It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.
We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.
All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.
Away with the cant of 'Measures not men!'-the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along.
You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.
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