Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no "normal," because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can't compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they're probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake.

I always thought the time machine is the device that's missed most. Without even saying it out loud, that's the thing people want the most: The ability to take whatever it is that went wrong and fix it.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

I will live forever, or at least until I'm forty-five.

And if something is only itself, it doesn't particularly matter.

Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose.

But I've mellowed over time, which is what all wine drunks and dope smokers say when trying to justify why they quit trying.

It's impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.

I rarely remember the names or faces of nonfictional people.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel—it's too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else.

Every visual reflects the same statement: The hedonistic, euphoric, high-gloss 1980s are over. It took five minutes to killdoze an entire decade.

One of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough.

The future is always impossible.

Whenever someone says something that's both realistic and abhorrent, It makes me suspect everyone else is lying about everything else.

If you know exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated.

His separation from the rest of society is beyond vast. But we are not working within the parameters of reality; we are working within the parameters of televised sport. And that's a critical difference. It essentially makes Ralph Sampson a tall, emotive, representational nonhuman slave. And within these parameters, four thousand rebounds don't mean shit.

But of course, this limitation was not something people worried about, because caring that much about any TV show was not a normal thing to do.

Roughly 5.3 million people watched the first episode of The Walking Dead on AMC, a stunning 83 percent more than the 2.9 million who watched the season four premiere of Mad Men. This means there are at least 2.4 million cable-ready Americans who would prefer watching Christina Hendricks if she were an animated corpse.

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

Hardcore Gen X-tacy was a fringe concern. Things regularly cited as generationally totemistic were almost always less popular than things devoid of cultural timeliness. Bridget Jones's Diary was more widely read than Jesus' Son. For every album sold by Courtney Love, Shania Twain sold fourteen. Over and over, the gap between what's most associated with Generation X dogma and the behavior of Generation X consumers is illogically vast.

My imagination has problems with plot mechanics.

But here's the thing: He didn't get hung. The man climbed on a wooden watercraft and collided with North America by accident. It doesn't matter what happened afterwards or what his motives were. He found it. It happened. He's what history is. It was his destiny to be that particular man, and it was his destiny to do those specific things.

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don't care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.