Transmigration Of The Soul Quotes

“There is no sense in refusing honours. That is in fact to do them too much honour. The only strategy is to act so that they never weigh upon you.

Your delicious (and malicious) certainty that you are a beautiful woman only subjugates yourself. How is one to approach her to be subjugated oneself?

It seems difficult to meet the woman of your life when you have several (lives). In fact, as soon as you have a double life . . .

Popular fame is what we should aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher's who has seen you on television.

With their feet caught in the ice like the pink flamingos, they still thought they were God's gift to mankind.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“I arrive, by a snow-covered path, at a kind of chateau. The room I enter by is covered all over with several inches of snow - even on the furniture and the ceiling. Shining in through the window are fierce, fluorescent advertisements in blue and red. I walk through the huge rooms secretively. I once lived here. Voices come near. I feel worried, since these are important men and I have no right to be here. But their voices change, their eyes change too, and suddenly they become mental defectives. The mansion is an asylum and indeed a nurse is stretched out on a long table in the peristyle. I wake up, retaining an exact impression of having once been mad myself in this very place, in a previous life.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“True immortality is the immortality of childhood and adolescence, where you never think you will have to die one day. The phantasm of immortality is merely the price paid for the certainty of dying. And it is ready to pay any price, including that of annihilating itself to achieve immortality.
In the past, some were prepared to lose their souls (their hope of eternal life) in a pact with the Devil to enjoy the privileges of mortal existence. Today we are ready to sacrifice any idea of a future immortality for a present corporeal immortality, a perpetual renewal in cloning. Immortality is no longer a metaphor. We want a real immortality, we want a technical incarnation of it here and now. This is the new pact with the Devil, sealed and signed in blood by the human race, which prefers to be cryogenized alive rather than await some hypothetical resurrection of bodies.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“She can jettison her existence, her plans and her passions at a single stroke. She is only committed to reality through a secret electoral pact, by which she will stand down if she is losing. She never assumes responsibility for her existence, which allows her to wipe out at a stroke and to slide, like a good hysteric, towards another life. A strange life, spun out entirely towards a goal of transaction. Let a man ask her to give it up, to sacrifice the whole of it, and it all ceases to exist.

The Epeda Multispire mattress. Everyone can have their own night, their own sleep thanks to the 3,600 spiral springs which guarantee everyone complete autonomy. The ideal mattress. You can make love to someone on it without them even noticing. As the automaton of his own pleasure, each person’s experience of their sexuality is like their experience of a night on a Multispire mattress. It isn’t even loneliness, since there is someone else there. It’s more something of the order of the independent lunar module. Tristan and Isode each dreaming to themselves, on either side of their sexual console.

That seduction is the seduction of the uterine Mother and that all attraction merely masks the attraction of the primal abyss are platonic ideas. The cavity of the womb has taken over from the Cave in the Realm of Ideas. Once again, the real woman, her anatomy, serves as a sacred referent for a platonic ideology. The vertigo of seduction is here vulgarly phantasized into the hollow of a woman’s womb. This is to move from the most subtle game to the most profound—and hence the most stupid—phantasm.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The only passion today: the passion for a multiplicity of simultaneous lives, for the metamorphosis and anamorphosis of modes of life, of places, of ways of loving. Every object is unique and should be all that our imaginations require. But there’s nothing we can do about it: we have to move on from one to another. Every landscape is sublime, but there’s nothing we can do about it: we have to swap them one for another continually and the sublime today lies in the intercontinental flight which connects them all together. The capacity to pass from one life to another, and not to die in only one life – that beats everything.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“All things considered, what we look for in other people is perhaps the same gentle deterritorialization we look for in travel. The temptation of exile in the desire of another and of journey across that desire come to be substituted for one's own desire and for discovery. Often looks and amorous gestures already have the distance of exile, language expatriates itself into words which are afraid to mean, the body is like a hologram, gentle on the eyes and soft to the touch, and can thus easily be striated in all directions by desire like an aerial space. We move circumspectly within our emotions, passing from one to another, on a mental planet made up of convolutions. And we bring back the same transparent memories from our excesses and passions as we do from our travels.

The more advanced life-simulation technology becomes, the more the question of the soul intervenes, perversely, as an accident. Everything becomes transformed into a pure, incessant production of accidents. From the moment we leave the world of substance and come to live in that of accident, perversion becomes normal and constitutive.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“I cannot understand how this is to come about but come about it must. It seems boy that we move within the confines of our own consciousness, would that I could expand my gaze to become aware of all the activities of my own being.”
― Geoff Widders, Flight of the Shaman

“I'm not stoned now, Jack,' she said quietly. 'I'm straight, maybe straighter than I've ever been in my life. We all go through changes. I watched you go through yours, and I couldn't take it. Now I think I've gone through one of my own, a big one. It happens like that sometimes, six years of things just happening to you but not really getting through to your head, and then something, acid plus something, maybe something silly and meaningless triggers the big flash, and suddenly all those six years come through all the way at once and you feel them, feel the years before too, and all the possible futures, all in a moment, and nothing's happened in that moment that anyone else can see, but you're just not the same you anymore. There's a gap, a discontinuity, and you know you can't go back to being what you've been but you don't yet know what you are.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron