I’ve seen America with no clothes on.
St. Vincent, Cheerleader
Quotes
America is a place where black people are chased and gunned down, and it is a place where black people dance and sing to distract—themselves, maybe, but also the country at large—from that carnage. America is a room in which violence and celebration happen together, and the question of which one draws the eye is one of framing, and of what the viewer wants to see.
Donald Glover Is Watching You Watch Him by Spencer Kornhaber
…in the tarot of popular culture he [Mark Maron] represents the Happy Failure, or what Walker Percy called the Ex-Suicide: the man who, having elected to live, can sit on his front steps and laugh at the world.
Marc Maron’s Brilliant Mistakes, in the Atlantic
…on the rooftops of the apartment buildings, there were fields of satellite dishes gazing up to the sky like sunflowers. It didn’t make sense. Inside their homes people were watching cnn, bbc, hbo, and mtv, while out on the street they were supposed to be wary of stooges.
Rock the Junta, from Mother Jones July 2006, by Scott Carrier
The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
The Busy Trap, by Tim Kreider
Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.
I Married a Communist, by Philip Roth
If you’re thinking ‘Well that doesn’t sound like that big of a problem’ …then congratulations on your white penis.
John Oliver, Last Week Tonight: Online Harassment
When you start your career you might think you are setting out to change the world, but the world is far more likely to change you.
So watch yourself, because no one else will.
It was probably nothing but it felt like the world.
Morrissey, Autobiography (p. 141)
I wouldn’t deny anyone their O phase. I had mine.
I want it back.
And I never want to see it again.
DEAR DAMIEN RICE’S SEMINAL 2002 ALBUM O, by Josh Radnor