Quotes by Chuck Klosterman

In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.

Record sales dont matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.

The deeper reality is that I’m not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I’m certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel?…There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There’s probably a third level, too—how I want to think I feel.

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.

And Im probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true--both objectively and subjectively--is habitually provisional.

And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

And if something is only itself, it doesnt particularly matter.

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

I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting Newt Gingrich and having a chat with the fellow on a staircase,” ex–Sex Pistols vocalist John Lydon once told Rolling Stone. “I found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn’t care.

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

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.

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--its disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. Its astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. Its almost like those things didnt happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you dont really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you cant even remember her name.

We are always dying, all the time. Thats what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

...Ive spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as the sport of the future since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.

... the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

...but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.