The Second Plane Quotes

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can't tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it's the last thing to go.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood...Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief - unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“I was once asked: ‘Are you an Islamophobe?’ And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007