Chuck Klosterman citations

Page 2

“We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.”

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”

“Internet porn makes everything more reasonable -- once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy.”

“Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?”

“The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.”

“I am ready to be alone.”

“Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they're not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it's only a matter of time.”

“Styx and The Stones may break my bones but 'More than Words' will never hurt me”

“The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.”

“It doesn't matter what you can do if you don't know why you're doing it.”

“In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.”

“If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word “coincidence” exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.”

“It has always been my belief that people are remembered for the sum of their accomplishments but defined by their singular failure.”

“Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.”

“This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.”

“The soul is a circle”

“We all eventually become whatever we pretend to hate.”

“Saying you like "Piano Man" doesn't mean you like Billy Joel; it means you're willing to go to a piano bar if there's nothing else to do”

“It's possible this whole "Why do Latinos love Morrisey?" question will haunt us forever. Fortunately, Canadian academics are on the case.”

“Even though I wanted to experience all these things I was interested in, I couldn't get them. So I had to think critically and culturally about what was available.”

“Do you understand? Do you see the forest through the trees? Do you not see what I am no longer not saying to you? If so—congratulations! Prepare to have sex constantly.”

“The message of "The Winner Takes It All" is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated.”

“Mostly, we argued about who which of us was better at arguing, and particularly about who had won the previous argument.”

“If invited, you would go to this person's wedding and give them a spice rack, but you would secretly hope that their marriage ends in a bitter, public divorce.”

“If you meet someone who has the same first name as this person, you immediately like them less.”

“But the bottom line is that I am still willing to die a painful public death, assuming my execution destroys the game of soccer (or - at the very least - convinces people to shut up about it).”

“Psychologically, the internet is very marxist. Everyone with a modem has access to the same information, so we all get jammed into a technological middle class.”

“If this person slept with your girlfriend, she would never be attractive to you again.”

“If you've spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you've probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences. Sort of like this! This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence! It's supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware! And this is idiotic. It's the saddest kind of failure. F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader really isn't sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend that they're amused. All those extraneous exclamation points are like little splatters of canned laughter: They represent the “form of funny,” which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness.”