Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.

Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner.

When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.

The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it's like Pet Sounds. The wide-scale adoption of political correctness was silly, but not unreasonable. The freedom that was lost was mostly theoretical and rarely necessary. No one is significantly worse off.

If I were an adult, I would be drinking coffee; as it is, I'm drinking Mountain Dew.

the Mandela Effect is a collective delusion in which large swaths of the populace misremember a catalog of indiscriminate memories in the same way.

But when you're naturally better than everyone else, and when that talent is so utterly obvious, being quiet doesn't translate as humble. It translates as boredom.

As 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.

If you hate everything, you're a banal asshole…but if you don't hate anything, you're boring.

he was forty bushels beyond bamboozled.

Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation.

the increasingly common ideology that assures people they're right about what they believe.... is, however, socially detrimental . It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.

Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.

I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don't do shit. They do nothing, all night long. They sit in a recliner and watch TV. I've probably watched more television than anyone you've ever met, and I don't even own one. Terrible shows, good shows, Golf tournaments in Cancun. C-SPAN. Hours of Oprah. Law and Order. Lonely people love Law and Order, for whatever reason. They prefer the straight narratives. p60

An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: "The biggest problem in my life," he said, "is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.

Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn't there.

The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation—and that's almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.

For reasons both explicable and debatable, Xers complained less pedantically than the demographic they followed and less vehemently than the demographic that came next.

We are remembered for the totality of our accomplishments, but we are defined by the singularity of our greatest failure. It does not matter what you have been right about, and it does not matter how often that rightness is validated by others. We are what we cannot do.

In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.

a phone without an answering machine would ring incessantly until the caller gave up. You had to answer the phone in order to stop the phone. But the main reason everyone always answered the telephone was the impossibility of knowing who was on the line. Every ringing phone was, potentially, a life-altering event. It might be a telemarketer, but it also might be a death in the family. It could be your next-door neighbor, but it could also be the governor, and there was only one way to find out.

There are entrenched ideas (both positive and negative) about what the internet is, conceded even by those who disagree with the veracity of the assertions: the way it refigures politics and social organization, the degree to which it alters the experience of adolescence, its contradictory ability to connect and estrange simultaneously, and its overall acceleration of the news cycle.

Modern people hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century—the kind of people who voted for Bill Clinton twice and (perhaps) saw fragments of their own lives within the problems he created for himself. And it was, in all probability, the last time in history such problems would be considered worthy of contemplation.