Tao Lin Quotes - Page 2

You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.

I know,' said Erin, and described how she'd lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans - more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem 'darker.

I just keep investing in the future, and I haven't reached the point where I'm not doing that.

If I wrote about "being [abstraction]" I would be ignoring existential issues (such as death, limited-time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the mystery of consciousness) that I feel affect me most in my life and think about most of the time. Another reason is that it doesn't seem specific or accurate, to me, to write about "being [abstraction]." I think there are some other reasons.

I was delivering pizzas at Domino's. I was 17 maybe. I liked it a lot. Just driving in the nice weather and listening to music.

I think Gmail chats are different than IRL conversations because Gmail chats are saved by Gmail exactly as they occurred. I like texts and emails. Seems like I don't have anything to say that isn't obvious about texts, emails, and Gmail chats.

It seems like most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives.

Focusing on being a person instead of an Asian or an [anything] seems to promote a worldview that encourages people to treat others based on what each person has specifically done in their life, which seems like it would reduce such things as war, racism, unfairness, "hate crimes," [other things most people feel aversion toward].

It seems like I'm not [happy]. Because if you look at my tweets and what I think and say, it seems like I'm worried about what's going to happen.

If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.

It seems like for the last 10 years, I've just been investing in the future.

I don't know what to say about Asians. I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at (for example skin color, bone structure), but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.

Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.

Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true—life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.

Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.

I usually have Kafka biography in my bathroom. It's a book I can open at random and feel interested in immediately. It's really funny. With this book, since I'm opening it at random and immediately interested, I don't feel the need to read more than I want to read, in that there's not, like, a plot that leads me along. So I can stop whenever.

Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.

sad things are beautiful only from a distance therefore you just want to get away from them from a distance of one hundred and thirty years ....i'm going to distance myself until the world is beautiful

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

I'm a shy, nervous person, and I don't like teaching with "terms." I didn't teach them, like, "This is first person, this is second person, this is foreshadowing," or whatever, so no one probably felt like they were learning anything. But I feel like teaching in that way reduces the concept to a term.

note the similarities with buddhism a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad primarily because it does not know the concept of sad [...]

On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.

We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.

Matt would stare at Andrew for 10 minutes. It's depressing that people are different. Everyone should be one person, who should then kill itself in hand-to-hand combat.

When I'm talking to someone I think 'can I use this dialogue in a book,'" said Luis. "If the answer is no I try talking to someone else.