Quotes from Rob Sheffield

Unlike me, Renee was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people's secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did.

I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language. Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say.

The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics.

Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one.

When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.

One of Renee's friends asked her, "Does your boyfriend wear glasses?" She said, "No, he wears a Walkman.

Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.

The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.

some people aren't worth the trouble of being kind to, because they have neither the brains nor the power to make something for themselves out of your kindness.

The hungry feeling and the lonely feeling merged until it was hard to tell them apart.

Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of life.

In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.

Ah, the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either, it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationship.

But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it.

Madonna was so flamboyant in terms of her look, her style, her public pronouncements, her religious taboo-smashing.

Hardly anyone liked R.E.M. who didn't like them way too much, so part of being an R.E.M. fan meant getting wildly overinvested and then feeling vaguely disappointed by whatever they did next.

Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.

Thanks for existing, R.E.M. It's hard to overstate how much these guys changed everything, creating an entire rock audience in their own image.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

Our amour fou with 'The Sopranos' is headed for long-term parking, like so many of its most memorable characters. We'll never see a show like this again.

Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.

Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.

Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them.

I've built my whole life around loving music. I'm a writer for 'Rolling Stone,' so I am constantly searching for new bands and soaking up new sounds.