01UndatedHumanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
02UndatedI love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you play the stereo at max volume, it's almost like the other people can't see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
03UndatedIf I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
04UndatedIf you play "I Don't Want To Know" by Fleetwood Mac loud enough -- you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. ...And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
05UndatedIt might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
07UndatedRecord sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
08UndatedThe deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
09UndatedIn Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
11UndatedAnd I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
12UndatedThe practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
13UndatedAnd the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
14UndatedThe world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
16UndatedIt's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
17UndatedI’ve had the great pleasure of meeting Newt Gingrich and having a chat with the fellow on a staircase,” ex–Sex Pistols vocalist John Lydon once told Rolling Stone. “I found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn’t care.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
19UndatedAs recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn’t own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don’t own a TV simply means you’re poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
20UndatedEveryone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
21UndatedWhen you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
22UndatedWe 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.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
23Undated...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
24Undated... the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.Chuck Klosterman / quote ↗
