Quotes from Tao Lin

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.

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

Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.

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.

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

He used to think things like, This organic soymilk will make me healthy and that'll make my brain work better and that'll improve my writing . Also things like, The less I eat the less money I spend on publicly owned companies the less pain and suffering will exist in the world . Now he thinks things like, It is impossible to be happy . Why would anyone think that?

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.

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.

We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don't know what to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place— in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb— to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin, at some point, to think about what to do about himself.

It was a face that said, "Fuck the world," but said it reluctantly, and tonelessly, and then apologized, said "Sorry," but said all of this so shyly that no one heard, anyway, except for himself. A year ago, Uncle Larry went to the hospital with the flu, somehow fell into a coma, and, a few days later, died.

People went up and down Sixth Avenue with the word motherfucker in their heads. They felt no emotions, had no sensation of life, love, or the pursuit of happiness, but only the knowledge of being stuck between a Thursday and a Saturday, air and things, this thought and the next, philosophy and action; birth, death, God, the devil, heaven, and hell. There was no escape, ever, was what people felt.

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.

my favourite emotions include 'brief calmness in good weather' and 'i am the only person alive

a kind of emptiness existed in the center of my bagel; really it was just the hole that's in the middle of all bagels; 'i need to go read my blog to find out what my politics are

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

as a teenager i experienced existential despair as an unsexy sensation of repressed orgasm in the chest; today i experience existential despair as a distinct sensation of wanting to lecture you on how i am better than you, without crushing your hopes and dreams