395 Quotes by Chuck Klosterman

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

Life is rarely about what happened; it’s mostly about what we think happened.

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I’m totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.

In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn’t seem to care.

Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.

My mind and gut are never simpatico: Every time I think somebody likes me, she doesn’t; every time I think somebody doesn’t like me, she does. This has never changed and I’m certain it never will.

The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time.

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.

The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality.