"Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same."
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Quote collection
Tao Lin quotes (page 1 of 4)
67 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Do you sometimes look up from the computer and look around the room and know you are alone, I mean really know it, then feel scared ?"
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"As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls."
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"Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it."
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"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."
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"My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, "You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning.""
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"note the similarities with buddhism a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad primarily because it does not know the concept of sad [...]"
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"Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon."
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"I feel connected with people because of their sense of humor, worldview, and what they think and feel about certain existential issues (things not affected, in my view, by if someone rides a horse or drives a car or talks only IRL or only by typing), not how old they are, what they use to convey what they think and feel about certain existential issues, or if we have both watched the same TV shows or looked at the same websites."
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"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"
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"Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake."
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"On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in."
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"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."
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"does a society exist where it's become acceptable to wear 'helmets' enclosing one's entire head when in public to preempt social interaction"
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"I don't know how to incorporate regret. But I'll say, like, "It affected me that way," "I learned this," "Next time maybe I'll do it differently"."
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"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."
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"We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do."
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"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."
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"Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore."
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"Rejection is good. Putting others ahead of self, giving things away. Success, money, power, fame, happiness, friends; any kind of pleasure - giving it all away, in the pyramid scheme of life, with the knowledge that everything will be returned, and being satisfied with that knowledge; not with the actual return of things, but the idea of the return of things. There is death."
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