12 Quotes by Matthew De Abaitua

Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.

Kindness is not entered onto the great ledger of civilisation.

If you said to me, “I do not love, I have never loved,” then you would sound incomplete. Equally, if you say “I do not hate, I have never hated,” then you sound like half a man.

Her self lagged behind her anger, like a mother picking up after a destructive child.

It is in his obsessions that mankind most closely resembles his machines.

Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on.

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.

A talent for forgetting is necessary to maintain civility.