That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.
Irvine WelshRead
A lot of people pulled me up after 'Trainspotting' for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that not addressing political issues can itself be a political statement.
Irvine Welsh highlights the idea that the decision to exclude politics from a narrative or work of art can be a conscious and political choice in itself. This perspective challenges the assumption that all art must engage with political themes, proposing instead that silence or absence can convey its own message about societal issues and human experiences.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of art in society, this quote can be used to argue for the value of non-political narratives.
That's the kind of consumer society we live in. We're always looking for the next product that's going to change your life instead of just going out and changing your life.
Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.
I was anti-everything and everyone. I didn't want people around me. This aversion was not some big crippling anxiety; merely a mature recognition of my own psychological vulnerability and my lack of suitability as a companion. Thoughts jostled for space in my crowded brain as i struggled to give them some order which might serve to motivate my listless life.
His eyes are wild, psychotic slits that bat-dance in your soul looking for good things to crush or bad elements to identify with.
It was the books I started reading. It was the music I started listening to. It was the television I started watching. I found myself thinking again. I tried to stop because it was only causing pain. I couldn't. Wen all this is in your head it has to come out into your life. If it doesn't, you get crushed. I'm not going to get crushed.
There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.
You can't talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can't talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of the slums. You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism.
King of the animals β as thou hast described him β I should rather say king of the beasts, thou being the greatest β because thou hast spared slaying them, in order that they may give thee their children for the benefit of the gullet, of which thou hast attempted to make a sepulchre for all animals; and I would say still more, if it were allowed me to speak the entire truth.
He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set; on the contrary, he who imitates what is good always falls short.
It must really be a lonelier journey than anyone could imagine. Cutting through absolute darkness, encountering nothing but the occasional hydrogen atom. Flying blindly into the abyss, believing therein lie the answers to the mysteries of the universe.
The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law. - Romeo
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
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