Fall-out Quotes

$Our planet... consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb...Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago. (James Lovelock)$

My retainers keep me on ice. Dry ice. It slows my metabolism, takes the edge off my appetite, slightly. I lie, bound with heavy chains, between two great slabs of it, naked and sweating, trying to sleep through the torment of a summer's day. They've given me the local fall-out shelter, the very deepest room they could find, as I requested. Yet my senses move easily through the earth and to the surface, out across the lazy, warm suburbs, restless emissaries skimming the sun-soaked streets. If I could rein them in I would, but the instinct that drives them is a force unto itself, a necessary consequence of what I am and the reason I was brought into being. Being, I have discovered, has certain disadvantages. I intend seeking compensation, just as soon as the time is right.

Greg Egan

As author in control of the plot I can choose and dictate the fall-out of events from any number of infinite possibilities -- which is a very volatile state of affairs, suggesting the ephemerality of fictional narrative. I can choose to have seven characters and kill six of them off in the first five minutes. I can have seventy characters and squash them under a fallen rock, make them copulate with beasts, sit them on the moon or turn their hair white. This casual condition of authorship is irresponsible.

Peter Greenaway

Breathing my mother in, Breathing my beloved in, Breathing, Breathing her nicotine, Breathing, Breathing the fall-out in, Out in, out in, out in, out in.

Kate Bush

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

Walker Percy

We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.

Haile Selassie