136 Quotes by Tao Lin

Fucked people, great weather.

Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true—life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.

Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.

She felt strange. For a moment it seemed to her that the day was already over--she was in bed, asleep, and then it was the next day and now here she was again. 'Oh,' she said.

Everyone stared...at their own hands, or else abstractedly at the wall, as there had become in the room a feeling of immobilization, something of both nostalgia and doom--a sort of gigantic helplessness...an unpleasant urge to stay still for a very long time, forever, perhaps, not saying or thinking anything, but just accepting one another, entering and absorbing and maybe, finally, somehow--with anonymity, osmosis, conjecture, and luck--then, experiencing one another.

This was a place impossible for romance, a place where tea was brewed, earnestly, from paint chips, glass shards, and small change. In this world, Sean knew, one could put faith in a toe bone, a blood bone, a cartilage of eye--all the unloved contributors of one's own body world.

Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it.

Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless of his mood and to not talk to people if his only reason to was because he felt lonely or bored.

The late-afternoon sky, in Paul's peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes—of nature's vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself—than of outer space, which was mostly what Paul thought of when beneath an urban sky, even in daytime, especially in Manhattan, between certain buildings, framing sunless zones of upper atmosphere, as if inviting space down to deoxygenate a city block.