Quotes from book
High-Rise

Name: High-Rise
Author: J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard

High-Rise is a 1975 novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The story describes the disintegration of a luxury high-rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos. As with Ballard's previous novels Crash and Concrete Island , High-Rise inquires into the ways in which modern social and technological landscapes could alter the human psyche in provocative and hitherto unexplored ways. It was adapted into a film of the same name, in 2015, by director Ben Wheatley.

“The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 1

“In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 8

“The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 2

“Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 16

“Without realizing it, [the architect] had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 3

“At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project — an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 1

“Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 15

“By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 3
Context: The more arid and effectless life became in the high-rise, the greater the possibilities it offered. By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses. It was precisely in these areas that the most important and most interesting aspect of their lives would take place. Secure within the shell of the high-rise, like passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly 'free' psychopathology.

“By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 13
Context: The untruth of the accusation, which they all knew well, only served to reinforce it... By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty.

“Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 11
Context: It's a mistake to imagine now we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection – obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.

“In the future, violence would clearly become a valuable form of social cement.”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 8

“These people were the first to master a new type of late twentieth-century life, they thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed”

J. G. Ballard book High-Rise

Source: High-Rise (1975), Ch. 3
Context: A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere... [They] were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no personal objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new type of late twentieth-century life, they thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.