Tao Lin famous quotes

Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.
-- Tao Lin

#Belief #Human Life #Humans

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 ?
-- Tao Lin

#Mean #Rooms #Looks

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Girl #Children #Two

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
-- Tao Lin

#Beautiful #Distance #Years

The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.
-- Tao Lin

#Feelings #Going Away #Tonight

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

#Strong #Average #World

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Book #Thinking #Talking

But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really.  It just went away after a while.
-- Tao Lin

#Emotion

One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.
-- Tao Lin

#Moments #Accumulation #Gifted

Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore.
-- Tao Lin

#Thinking #People

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Sadness #Heart #Scary

If I don't like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that's there. It's really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think about it.
-- Tao Lin

#Reading #Book #Thinking

He sometimes felt that life was something that had already risen, and all of this, the Jackson Pollack of spring, summer, and fall, the vague refrigeration and tinfoiled sky of wintertime, was just a falling, really, originward, in a kind of correction, as if by spritual gravity, towards the wiser consciousness--or consciousnessless, maybe; could gravity trick itself like that?--of death. It was a kind of movement both very slow and very fast; there was both too much and not enough time to think.
-- Tao Lin

#Summer #Spring #Fall

The distracting feeling of disbelief when you're finally doing something you've procrastinated on for notable amounts of time.
-- Tao Lin

#Feelings #Notable #Disbelief

I can feel the universe expanding and making things be further apart.
-- Tao Lin

#Expanding #Feels #Universe

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Skulls #People #Effort

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Animal #Ideas #Water

does a society exist where it's become acceptable to wear 'helmets' enclosing one's entire head when in public to preempt social interaction
-- Tao Lin

#Doe #Social #Helmet

loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shape of a helicopter the same size as the helicopter and that's it's only skill and it isn't good enough but it's still amazing.
-- Tao Lin

#Loneliness #Cutting #Skills

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Fear #Moving #Space

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Hilarious #Depressing #Hands

Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it.
-- Tao Lin

#Moose #Aliens #Sometimes

Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn't be moose there and the moose would fall.
-- Tao Lin

#Fall #Tired #Years

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Mistake #Loneliness #Long

A world without right or wrong was a world that did not want itself, anything other than itself, or anything not those two things, but that still wanted something. A world without right or wrong invited you over, complained about you, and gave you cookies. Don't leave, it said, and gave you a vegan cookie. It avoided eye contact, but touched your knee sometimes. It was the world without right or wrong. It didn't have any meaning. It just wanted a little meaning.
-- Tao Lin

#Eye #Two #Cookies

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.
-- Tao Lin

#True Life #Video #Incredibles

It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else–pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.
-- Tao Lin

#Half #Entertainment #Comedy

Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.
-- Tao Lin

#Cake #People #Easy

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

#Night #Sitting #Stills

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

#Buddhist #Buddhism #Doe

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.
-- Tao Lin

#World #Kind #Term

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.
-- Tao Lin

#Pyramid Schemes #Self #Ideas