395 Quotes by Chuck Klosterman

Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything.

Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously both cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist.

Maybe I could survive in one of those resort prisons where they house white-collar criminals. I’ve always wanted to get better at tennis.

Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let’s roll.

I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.

I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn’t inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it.

The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It’s a mistake that never stops being made.

If you don’t have a job, you don’t have a fear of losing it. You fear having to get one.

The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, thereby allowing himself to die in an accident he had previously avoided. By removing himself from the equation, he never meets his new girlfriend, which keeps her from dying in a car accident that was his fault.