Virginia Heffernan famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Depression #Thinking #People
I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Grief #Suffering #Sorrow
If beauty is only skin deep, look really, really hard.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Dating #Romance #Skins
Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Holiday #Mean #Phones
People act as if the internet will never die, that the Cloud will never die. In the face of that, much of human civilization, including our human bodies, seem so defective and mortal and constantly fading. Our lifespan is 80 years, 90 years if we're lucky, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to how long we think the internet will live.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Thinking #Long #People
One of the paradoxes that makes the internet such a suggestive place is that, on the one hand, we perceive it as perpetually in motion and changing, and, on the other hand, it has this god-like immortality to it: It seems like it won't die and is not subject to decay, and that everything can be unwound, unlike present-tense experience, where you can't archive the present moment, you can't go back and read it over again. That's the fundamental hallmark of the internet.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Internet #Moments #Immortality
There's always something in new technology that promotes anxiety on the one hand, but also grieving on the other. With the internet, I think we can remember a time when people said "I don't use email," or "I'm not going to get email." I once had to do a piece on people who had never used the internet and refused to start and I found three people. But when I talked to them, they had used it, at some point or another. It's almost impossible to stay off the internet entirely. We feel as though we didn't get to make a decision. There's this new dawn and we all have to embrace it.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Technology #Thinking #Grieving
When I first got on the internet as a tween, I wasn't comfortable showing up in social spaces. I didn't have a loud voice. As a function of my youth and gender, I wasn't given a voice at the dinner table, and nor maybe should I have been. But I thought I wanted one, and I was able to have it online. I wasn't a great talker, but I found these other skills. And when this stuff is described as "not real writing" or "bad for my brain" or whatever, it just seems like it's from people who wanted to keep their place at the dinner table.
-- Virginia Heffernan

#Real #Writing #People

I'd been depressed before, of course. But I'm talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I'm talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.
Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.
My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.
Indo-European peoples and Semitic peoples are today still completely different... Jews almost everywhere form a special society... Muslims (the Semitic spirit is today represented mainly by Islam) and the Europeans stand face to face like two beings of different species, having nothing common in the way of thinking and feeling...
There's the South Pole, said Christopher Robin, and I expect there's an East Pole and a West Pole, though people don't like talking about them.
Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.
The bells they sound on Bredon, And still the steeples hum. "Come all to church, good people"- Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come.
Find a need and fill it. Successful businesses are founded on the needs of people.

Virginia Heffernan famous quotes

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