well, i just finished chuck klosterman’s newest novel, “the invisible man”, and it was weird. weird, weird, weird, weird, weird.
anyways, i plan to write a more eloquent review once i’ve had a bit more time to process. in the meantime, as with any chuck klosterman book, there are a handful of really fantastic quotes i would like to share.
“People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.”
“Everything science gives us immediately becomes normative. To an eighty-year-old man, a computer is this amazing device that creates instantaneous access to limitless information. He can’t get his head around it. But to a twenty-year-old man, the computer is a limited machine that costs too much and always needs to be faster. Because humans live finite lives, all technological advances immediately feel banal to whatever generation inherits their benefits. Any advance can be appreciated only by the handful of people who happen to exist within the same time period of that specific technology’s introduction.”
“Over time, the net benefit of technology is always going to be zero.”
“There’s just no real evidence that proves peoples in the fifteenth century were less happy than people are now, just as there’s no reason to think people in the twenty-fifth century will have happier, better lives than you or me. This is a strange notion to accept, but it’s true. And once I accepted that truth, it forced me to reevaluate everything I did as an intellectual.”
“We always end up being ourselves, somehow.”
“People trust their friends more than they trust themselves.”
“Even the invisible are insecure. It’s the most universal problem we have. It’s so universal, it might not even count as a problem.”
“I can’t accept someone who forces me to explain how I feel, simply to contradict a preexisting opinion they incorrectly applied in the first place.”
“Kids live through computers now. They make all their friends over the Internet, so they don’t understand how non-verbal communication works. They don’t understand body language or casual sarcasm. They love irony, but they never understand any joke they don’t make themselves.”
“Not everything is symbolic of something else. Not everything is a trope. Sometimes music is music.”
“It wasn’t that I’d forgotten how it feels to be alone. It was more like I had never even thought about how being alone was supposed to feel, until that very moment.”
“So this is what my life had become: I was married to an aging historian who carried a hammer everywhere he went, with the sole intent of bludgeoning an invisible man as punishment for falling in love with me.”
“Our exposure to media makes everyone believe they can conceptualize certain popular impossibilities.”
“Human nature is impossible to overcome.”
“All his worst qualities were totally transparent, but so were the things that made him different than other people. What can I say? I can’t deny that he was interesting, even if he was interesting in a negative way.”
