184 Quotes About Modern-life

In our consumer culture, we always want the next best thing: the latest, the newest, the youngest. Failing that, we at least want more: more intensity, more variety, more stimulation. We seek instant gratification and are increasingly intolerant of any frustration. Nowhere are we encouraged to be satisfied with what we have, to think, "this is good. This is enough.

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway.

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

Although we may wish for more or strive to do better than we have, in these times it is enough to keep your soul.

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

Urbanity provides us with so many ways to avoid people. Isn't that what distinguishes it from traditional rural life, where the onus, perhaps because it was difficult & rare, was more on greeting people?

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh."[Afterword]