Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade Of Curious People And Dangerous Ideas Quotes
"I don’t think she has any idea what’s really happening to her."
"Her refusal created an intense dichotomy among her handlers."
"The streets will flow with the blood of the nonbelievers!"
"There is just so much in this wicked world that can kill us."
"Fast-food culture? Ha! There is no such thing."
"My heart is broken. It hurts almost as much as my tummy."
"If I could have a handful of fries, everything would be different."
"You can want everything, so long as you get nothing."
"What keeps Britney perfect—is that she can produce a video where people lick the sweat off her body and still effortlessly insist the song has no relationship to sex whatsoever."
"To be honest, I have a hard time finding a reason to be on the cover of SPIN."
"The technological metronome of the United States is obsessed with progress."
"We have to go back. The last twenty years have been filled with digital, technological crap that's taken the soul out of music."
"If you strip down all human beings to their core, you'll find the same stuff."
"Some people will just kind of fall into that culture - you know, white people pretending to be black people or whatever - because they're involved in an environment where they want to fit in and want to have friends."
"We'll all sit around and listen to an old Supremes record or a Martha Reeves and the Vandellas record and marvel at the production level, especially considering how cheaply it was done."
"Sometimes when you grow up around all these people who only listen to hip-hop, something inside of you just doesn't connect with that."
"Nobody hates Arenas for being odd; it has exclusively served to make him more beloved."
"It’s impossible to control what you cannot understand."
"There’s any historical equivalent for Arenas’s persona, it’s probably Mark 'The Bird' Fidrych."
"It’s an honest explanation of his motives: he deliberately created a way to be idolized by strangers."
"The National Basketball Association—like all sports leagues—thrives on control."
"Nobody consciously believes this is true until after the fact."
"This will not be lost on future historians, and—in fifty years, or in two hundred years—they will search for events within the popular culture that embodied the zeitgeist of this particular time."
"Performance-enhancing drugs create two problems for baseball bean counters—one of which is predictable and one of which is not."
"Bands like the Ramones don’t make platinum records; that’s what bands like Ratt do."
"Modern punk is just stripped-down, straightforward music with no frills and few compromises."
"It's important to realize that the way you view baseball and the way Barry Bonds views baseball has almost no relationship whatsoever."
"Baseball holds as much symbolic value to him as delivering the mail does to your postman."
"The reason Bonds would jeopardize his legacy is because he doesn’t view it as a 'legacy.' He views it as an occupation he doesn’t particularly enjoy."
"For all practical—and statistical—purposes, Ruth isn’t a real person."
"To care about these home runs is to care about nothing."
"Is it anything like that 1987 Andrew McCarthy film Mannequin?"
"You don’t need a friend and you don’t need a lover. What you need is (a) one quality nemesis and (b) one archenemy."
"If you choose to stop the bear, it will always rain."
"If something is done ironically, it cannot be Advanced."
"Life is fucking confusing. I don’t know anything, and neither do you."
"You can buy the goddamn record and play 'Maps' all goddamn day."
"File sharing is not a complex issue. There is nothing complex about it."
"If you got something for nothing, that's what stealing is."
"Modern people see almost no difference between 'being smart' and 'cheating creatively.'"
"You are a chump if you pay your taxes, you are a chump if you never lie, and you are a chump if you still pay full price for CDs."
"I’m fascinated by the hyper-desperate, darkly realistic, paper-chasing world of postmodern hip-hop."
"Humans will eventually go to war against the machines."
"Machines allow humans the privilege of existential anxiety."
"We personify anything we don’t understand: God, animals, hurricanes, mountain ranges, jet skis, strippers, etc."
"We are the slaves; the machines became our masters."
"We’ve spent half a century preparing for a war against a potential foe who—thus far—has been nothing but civil to us."
"If the human potential of every citizen was placed on a line graph, these select Super People would be the spikes that obliterate the mean."
"We need to tap into the DNA of unborn babies and make them more awesome."
"Just because something isn’t natural doesn’t mean it isn’t good."
"We can't analyze video games using the aesthetic tools we’ve developed to evaluate narrative art forms like books or films."
"Gamers don’t play because they’re drawn into the storyline; they play because there’s something intoxicating about the mix of exploring an environment and solving problems."
"This generation’s single most meaningful artistic idiom will still be—ultimately—meaningless."
"I like when it’s sunny and raining simultaneously."
"If you’re from North Dakota, you can see coldness."
"Nothing lasts forever, except the earth and sky."
"I have the easiest job in the world, and I’m really dreading going to work."
"When asked the question, 'When do you usually get to work?' virtually everyone in the newspaper industry subtracts twenty minutes from the time they actually arrive."
"Like all geniuses, I don’t work before noon."
"If I were an adult, I would be drinking coffee; as it is, I’m drinking Mountain Dew."
"If the first step to recovery is 'realizing there’s a problem' ... well, if you realize it, it can’t be much of a problem, can it?"
"The most outlandish modifiers I have used are workmanlike, adequate, and understandably predictable."
"When they named me chief film critic, they adamantly promised not to interfere with the content of my personal opinions."
"You mean the one that ran yesterday? The one about Fight Club?"
"I thought it made a brilliant point, actually. I thought it worked on multiple levels and delivered the kind of insight that smashes readers squarely in the solar plexus, momentarily changing the way they consume mass media."
"My editor is the kind of person who could have had a tremendously successful career if she lied on occasion, but she never does."
"Larry Lowman is actually more of an 'assjack,' which is like a jackass without the panache."
"Ann is the fucking salt of the earth, and I will punch anyone who disagrees."
"Chinese buffets have become the defining component of every Midwestern city; they are the backbone of modern-day Middle America."
"A self-actualized man need not consume anything else."
"The majestic power of the Chinese buffet is its sense of control."
"Every decision is mine; there are no compromises."
"Part of the reason I have managed to thrive as the smartest man alive is because I’m still willing to keep learning; I totally enjoy evolving."
"There’s nothing more satisfying than being owed an unnamed something."
"This is going to be the worst day of my life."
"Tomorrow is going to be the worst day of my life."
"I check my e-mail again, and I have three messages; all of them are comments on today’s Garfield comic strip."
"We’re all pretty sure Beetle Bailey represents the Zapatista Liberation Movement."
"I’m fantasizing about being famous and divorced after optioning my self-absorbed novel into a racially charged screenplay, and I live in a three-story beach house in Southern California."
"I am sullen and inconsolable; my friends shudder and feel better about their own lives."
"When I awake at 3:30 to piss, Donna is gone."
"The sun is shining lazily and snow is gently falling, but I don’t see any coldness in the atmosphere."
"For the second time in two days, I once again ponder what Donna does for a living."
"On Saturdays, I can get sweet and sour shrimp for $4.95, which is remarkable."
"I’ve always suspected I could get away with one murder."
"You could burn my clothes in the furnace room and hide my bones under the sink."
"A vehicle drives past me while I am looking up at the sun, my hands on my hips like a relief pitcher who just blew a save."
"Who would do such a thing? Who drives past a confused (and potentially anguished) man, not to mention a female corpse?"
"I am the only person at the newspaper who doesn’t know everyone else who works there."
"Who in the hell happened here? Some woman fell on your car? What does that even mean?"
"I’m almost tempted to wink at him like Richard Dawson, but that would be rude."
"I wish I had just met Donna St. Shockman ten minutes ago."
"It feels like the car is filling with carbon monoxide."
"I bet Alexis Nakita is a genius. I bet we have a lot in common."
"I bet she was a real heartbreaker when she wasn’t plummeting to her death—sort of a goth Gwen Stefani."
"Grover’s details regarding the event are amazingly lucid."