142 Quotes About Postmodernism

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness. It is like those characters in Hieronymus Bosch with a glass bell or a soap bubble around their head as a sign of their mental debility. A war enclosed in a glass coffin, like Snow White, purged ofany carnal contamination or warrior's passion. A clean war which ends up in an oil slick.

[Concerning Lyotard's ideology:]... Theory ought to be recognized as part of the problem, not as a potential solution.

Or, to put it another way, presuppositional apologetics--such as that developed by Francis Schaeffer, but also by Cornelius Van Til and, to a degree, Herman Dooeyeweerd--rejects classical apologetics precisely because presuppositionalism recognizes the truth of Derrida's claim that everything is interpretation (though I am admittedly radicalizing their intuitions).

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. -TS Elliot, quoted by Groothuis

Everyone is still caught up in these postmodern gimmicks or they’re just trying to rip off their favorite modernist from high school. For poetry, it’s mostly the style made famous by T.S. Eliot. And fiction it’s usually Faulkner or Hemingway, the latter of which was never that interesting to begin with.

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

The common-sense notion that 'There is a time and place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.