Alexis Wright Quotes

I think the world has mostly ended because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you're arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which road you took.

I have always been interested in the concept of ruin.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

I think of dystopian as 'Mad Max,' as 'Book of Eli,' as the world is ending.

When hope is taken away from the people moral degeneration follows swiftly after.

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed

We are on the verge of events, the like of which the world has not seen since the time of the barbarian invasion. Soon everything that constitutes our lives will strike the world as useless. A period of barbarism is about to begin and it will last for decades.

To be inside an abandoned mall is surreal. Often times I feel like I'm the last person alive on the planet.

I can quickly go to a place where I worry about society spiralling out of control.

'Atlanta' is Wild West-y - every corner of the city is trying to get by under its own rules. There's no single narrative. At the outer edges, the overgrown parking lots and project blocks, the city is a few yards away from apocalypse, and if you slow down, it could engulf you.

The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.

We have places in America that really have been just forgotten.

Now no one will listen to songs. The prophesied days have begun. Latest poem of mine, the world has lost its wonder, Don't break my heart, don't ring out.

Just understand that the end began long ago We got here just in time Look All the squares in the sidewalks were already there All these strangers have more money than you do All the good riffs have been taken And everyone is so scared Murder is commonplace I don't even flinch at the gunshots outside my window I feel lonely without them

Without hope, the very fabric of our society will fall apart.

The nameless loser in Jay McInerney's 'Bright Lights, Big City' is going to the dogs like a gentleman. He is too smart to blame anyone for the impasse he has come to, hip enough to know he does not know enough, too sophisticated to masquerade as an anti-hero.

Many of the young people living in inner-city America don't see themselves - I mean, they even talk about things like death and dying. And there's a tremendous loss of hope. And of all the things to lose, I think nothing is worse or more difficult to overcome than the loss of hope.

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.

Governments do not know what they cannot do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction.

And if you cast down an idol, there's nothing left.

The people is dead! Good-day, Self!

You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.