I hate the point where you have to get off the ladder, or get back on. I don’t know if that’s a fear of heights, or literally a fear of falling. I want to be afraid to fall. That seems like a good fear.
The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.
Gay marriage should be legalized in america because gay men are the only men who want to be married.
What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?
In some ways, Halloween is much easier for women. They can just dress as sluts, and it’s kind of a costume, if they never do any other time.
It was the kind of love you can only feel toward someone you don’t actually know.
Every generation is more influenced by technology, which is always changing faster.
I like storms. I would say I actively like stormy weather. I would not be afraid of them. I think that if I had not pursued journalism, I think storm-chasing would’ve been a really fun career.
It’s far easier to write why something is terrible than why it’s good. If you’re reviewing a film and you decide “This is a movie I don’t like,” basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it’s not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What’s hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.
The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don’t care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn’t matter to anyone who isn’t him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.
The mass media causes sexual misdirection: It prompts us to need something deeper than what we want. This is why Woody Allen has made nebbish guys cool; he makes people assume there is something profound about having a relationship based on witty conversation and intellectual discourse. There isn’t. It’s just another gimmick, and it’s no different than wanting to be with someone because they’re thin or rich or the former lead singer of Whiskeytown.
The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.
Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend – movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.
We’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.
The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It’s a mistake that never stops being made.
We must start from the premise that – in all likelihood – we are already wrong. And not “wrong” in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves.
This is the difference between the fox and the hedgehog. Both creatures know that storytelling is everything, and that the only way modern people can understand history and politics is through the machinations of a story. But only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem, which is why the fox is constantly wrong.
Sometimes I fantasize about the US head of state as a super-lazy, super-moral libertarian despot and think, “That would certainly make everything easier,” even though I can’t think of one person who’d qualify, except maybe Willie Nelson.
There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder.
Every night, we’re all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one’s teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we’ve stopped trying to figure out what they mean.