Phones Quotes

“What’s not so great is that all this technology is destroying our social skills. Not only have we given up on writing letters to each other, we barely even talk to each other. People have become so accustomed to texting that they’re actually startled when the phone rings. It’s like we suddenly all have Batphones. If it rings, there must be danger.

Now we answer, “What happened? Is someone tied up in the old sawmill?”

“No, it’s Becky. I just called to say hi.”

“Well you scared me half to death. You can’t just pick up the phone and try to talk to me like that. Don’t the tips of your fingers work?”
― Ellen DeGeneres, Seriously... I'm Kidding

“*For eleven years, I've been worked over and abused in ways you can't imagine by things you don't want to know about. I've killed every kind of vile, black-souled, dead-eyed nightmare that ever made you piss your pjs and cry for mommy in the middle of the night. I kill monsters and, if I wanted, I could say a word and burn you to powder from the inside out. I can tear any human you ever met to rages with my bare hands. Give me one good reason why I could possibly need you?
*She looks straight at me, not blinking. No fear in her eyes.
*Because you might be the Tasmanian Devil and the Angel of Death all rolled into one, but you don't even know how to get a phone.
*I hate to admit it, but she has a point.”
― Richard Kadrey, Sandman Slim

“The phone is an instrument of intrusion into order. It is a threat to control. Just when you think you are alone and safe, the call could come that changes your life. Or someone else's. It makes the same flat, mechanical noise for everyone and gives no clues what's waiting there on the other end of the line. You can never be too careful.”
― Janice Galloway, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

“Phones with numerical keypads worked best for dialing phone calls. Incidentally, phone calls tend to be the primary function of a phone. 'Smartphones' completely ignore these basic facts, resulting in some of the least intelligent devices I've seen yet. Oh the irony.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“Besides,’ continued Julian, ‘you can slam down a phone like that. You can’t slam down a mobile. Imagine, a whole generation who’ll never know the joy of slamming down a phone.”
― Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project

“They love to criticize us for being on our phones, despite the fact that their generation created the phones, marketed the phones, and are profiting from the phones. They're drug pushers making fun of the junkies, which, if you think about it, is lame AF. Besides, any day now those same junkies are taking over the street corner, so they should try to be nice.”
― Abbi Waxman, I Was Told It Would Get Easier

“A smartphone allows you to choose your own adventure. So be a hero, not a villain. Don’t be your own worst enemy. No wasting time… No training your brain not to remember things, losing the skills necessary to read a fucking map… No trolling. Don’t make snarky remarks on comment threads or internet forums or social media. Just do good. Help others. If you’re out in the world and bored, which you shouldn’t be anyway, but still, if you feel like you need to get on your phone, be useful. Answer questions, offer advice. Look only for question marks when you scroll through your Facebook news feed. Log on to Reddit and comment on something you have firsthand knowledge of and real insight about. Give far more than you take. Never text and walk. And stop googling things as you think of them. Instead, write it down and look it up later. If you can’t remember to do this, then you didn’t deserve to know the answer. This will keep your mind active, agile; clear to really think. It will keep you sharp. Using the internet for information or socialization should be an activity, something you sit down for—it should not be used while out and about. You should not refuse the beauty of what’s in front of you for mere pixels of red, green, blue on a 3.5-inch screen. Otherwise, you’ll lose yourself. An abyss of ones and zeros will swallow you whole. Don’t be a dumb motherfucker with a smartass phone.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Maybe you can imagine this in your own life. We no longer look at the sun but at our phones to see what kind of time has passed. We don't look out of our cells but at our cell, flipping to a social media stream and scrolling through what our friends are doing. While we scroll, we develop a resentment that our lives are less fun and fulfilling than the lives of our friends.
The here and now, the people who are around and present, pale in front of the manicured and curated versions of another person's life. We begin to wonder, like Evagrius, if we have lost the love of our friends, and we begin to believe that there is "none to comfort" us.
So we fill our evenings with overeating, because it feels comforting, or binge-watching our favorite show, because we are so tired that we just need to "relax." We split our attention between the screen of the television and the screen of our phones. Indeed, one of the most effective ways to avoid the gnawing questions of meaning is by staying busy enough to avoid them. A constant flow of information and distraction turns the mind and the heart away from the abyss of asking why. Why do we worry about tomorrow? Why do we toil and reap? What is the treasure of great price that all our lives are working toward?
When we do pause between activities, we try to fill the void. We forget that we are more than our work or the things that we produce. Our busyness represents a profound loss of freedom, and one that occurs through a gradual winnowing away of what it means to be human. We replace that it means to be a person with a shallowness of activity”
― Timothy McMahan King, Addiction Nation: What the Opioid Crisis Reveals about Us

“I threw both my phones in, one after the other. The splashing sounds they made in the dark were like two trout rising for stoneflies. Trout that sleep in the eddies behind round river boulders. Trout that wake up at dawn and hide all day by pretending to be shadows.”
― Steve S. Saroff, Paper Targets: Art Can Be Murder

“America's phones are bliss. Their habit of actually working is very disconcerting: Put in a coin, and speak to whoever answers. I truly hope it catches on everywhere.”
― Jonathan Gash, The Great California Game

“It's very difficult to phone people in China, Mr President,' said the Postmaster General. 'The country's so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

“When I check my phone

to remember I exist and I shake it and shake it I shake
myself, as if to clear the Etch A Sketch
of my face. If I’m dead inside

how would I know, how
would a bulb
check its own filament.”
― Brian Tierney

“Unfettered spaces scare me. I’m not used to scenes that aren’t in a frame. Looking at a picture inside a border always calms me down, whether it’s an ultravista or the real thing. It’s probably from all the TV.”
― Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom: Stories

“I can’t disconnect, you know? It’s like a drug. For one reason or another, I keep coming back.”
― Cliff Jones Jr., Dreck

“I was not surprised that the USA with its WiFi, cell phones, computers and indoor society had one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19 in the world.”
― Steven Magee

“In an interview om WNYC in 2015, Willliam Arkin, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, national security expert, and the author of Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Prefect Warfare, compared the military's compulsive data-collecting with unmanned drones to our collective addiction to our smartphones. "You can't just stop yourself from checking your e-mail or texting," Arkin said. "And that's the world of drones in a nutshell." Are we using our phones like drones? Compulsively checking on one another? And when we don't like what someone has to say, or perhaps how they look, dropping destructive speech bombs whose after-effects we never have to see in person?”
― Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

“When your technology is so out of date the Romans are ahead of you, it might be time for you to get a new phone. ~Either Side of Midnight~”
― Benjamin Stevenson

“Looking at your phone is the new smoking.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The addictive nature of social media and technology sends people into a pitfall of:
-Dopamine Hits
-Distractions
-Meaningless Actions”
― Ethan Castro

“These damn things! They distract then don’t work, they’re altogether terrible! Phones!”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“...phones have made it so easy to be friends without ever having to see your friends and that's one good thing about today. One.”
― Caroline Kepnes, You Love Me

“The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring: I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound, rushing to answer even though I am certain nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Ideally the book would begin by giving the sense of a space occupied by my presence, because around me there are only inert objects, including the telephone, a space that apparently cannot contain anything but me, isolated in my interior time, and then there is the interruption of the continuity of time, the space is no longer what it was before because it is occupied by the ring, and my presence is no longer what it was before because it is conditioned by the will of this object that is calling. The book would have to begin by conveying all this not merely immediately, but as a diffusion through space and time of these rings that lacerate the continuity of space and time and will.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“May you all wander and explore mother nature so that one day when you look back you have so much in your heart to tell...real stories to tell to your kids instead fake stories or giving them tablets or phones - just random thoughts”
― Guru Z.S. Gill

“It is a common occurrence to sit with a precious but struggling son or daughter of God who shares that while they have many friendly people in their life with whom they share a hobby, workspace, or the banter of small talk, they don’t feel they really have any core friends who regularly see and pursue them. They express restlessness at the lack of a place to belong. They are lonely. At the same time, these are almost always the same people who tell me they are “just too busy” to join a small group, ministry team, or even attend church regularly. Chalking their struggles up to God’s injustice, their brokenness, or a problem with the church, most don’t stop to consider a far more obvious truth. We’ve positioned our lives at a pace that is not conducive for building deep friendships. We spend 38 days a year staring at a screen in third person, but have lost the relational rhythms of building roots with actual people.”
― Chuck Ammons, En(d)titlement: Trade a Culture of Shame for a Life Marked by Grace

“Lately I’m too tired to care
about getting old. I never put my phone down.
I scroll many futures away. I sleep many futures
away, I write them away, the longer I live,
the more the future disappears.”
― Lena Moses-Schmidt

“When the phone rang she did not look at it the way they do in the movies. Real people don't look at ringing phones.”
― Don DeLillo, The Body Artist

“- Du känner till det där med yin och yang, och krona eller klave? Du kommer snart att fatta vart jag vill komma. Vet du att de två pajasarna som uppfann föregångaren till mobilen du har i handen började i ett garage där de använde sig av defekta komponenter från skroten på en stor flygindustri? Var de lumpsamlare eller genier?”
― Marc Levy

“The maintenance of my life, my relationship with my mum, my brother, all my close relationships, are mediated by how much Wi-Fi I have. If you got rid of everybody’s phones, everybody’s relationships would deteriorate. There’s this idea that we look down on any kind of discourse that we have online, that it’s this inauthentic version of communication, when actually it’s the primary driver of our relationships.”
― Matty Healy

“I flew on a Boeing 737 Max 9 in 2019. I remember it had a very weird climb to cruising altitude compared to other airplanes I had flown on. It was also a wireless WiFi streaming entertainment airplane that needed passengers to use their phones to stream to the airline app that had to be installed prior to take off. It had weird cabin lighting I had not seen before.”
― Steven Magee