Tao Lin

“He sometimes felt that life was something that had already risen, and all of this, the Jackson Pollack of spring, summer, and fall, the vague refrigeration and tinfoiled sky of wintertime, was just a falling, really, originward, in a kind of correction, as if by spritual gravity, towards the wiser consciousness---or consciousnessless, maybe; could gravity trick itself like that?---of death. It was a kind of movement both very slow and very fast; there was both too much and not enough time to think.”

“The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.”

“i will learn how to love a person and then i will teach you and then we will know"seen from a great enough distance i cannot be seeni feel this as an extremely distinct sensationof feeling like shit; the effect of small childrenis that they use declarative sentences and then look at your facewith an expression that says, ‘you will never do enoughfor the people you love’; i can feel the universe expandingand it feels like no one is trying hard enoughthe effect of this is an extremely shitty sensationof being the only person alive; i have been alone for a very long timeit will take an extreme person to make me feel less alonethe effect of being alone for a very long timeis that i have been thinking very hard and learningabout mortality, loneliness, people, society, and love; i am afraidthat i am not learning fast enough; i can feel the universe expandingand it feels like no one has ever tried hard enough; when i cried in your roomit was the effect of an extremely distinct sensation that ‘i am the only personalive,’ ‘i have not learned enough,’ and ‘i can feel the universe expandingand making things be further apartand it feels like a declarative sentencewhose message is that we must try harder”

“i recommend the phrase 'pineapple ass”

“that was bad; i shouldn't have done thatto prevent you from entering a catatonic statei am going to maintain a calm facial expressionwith crinkly eyes and an overall friendly demeanori believe in a human being that is not upseti believe if you are working i should not be insaneor upset--why am i ever insane or upset and not working?i vacuumed the entire house this morningi cleaned the kitchen and the computer roomand i made you a meat helmet with computer paperthe opportunity for change exists in each moment, all moments are aloneand separate from other moments, and there are a limited number of momentsand the idea of change is a delusion of positive or negative thinkingyour hands are covering your faceand your body moves like a statuewhen i try to manipulate an appendageif i could just get you to cry tears of joy one more time”

“a kind of emptiness existed in the center of my bagel; really it was just the hole that's in the middle of all bagels; 'i need to go read my blog to find out what my politics are”

“and that’s its only skilland it isn’t good enoughbut it’s still amazing”

“sad things are beautiful only from a distancetherefore you just want to get away from themfrom a distance of one hundred and thirty years ....i'm going to distance myself until the world is beautiful”

“Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.”

“It was a face that said, “Fuck the world,” but said it reluctantly, and tonelessly, and then apologized, said “Sorry,” but said all of this so shyly that no one heard, anyway, except for himself. A year ago, Uncle Larry went to the hospital with the flu, somehow fell into a coma, and, a few days later, died.”

“I felt confused, to some degree, by everything—but in a delayed manner, in that I seemed to be repeatedly realizing that I felt confused, instead of feeling directly confused”

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

“Yeah. I like Chopin. I feel like Chopin is ‘emo.’ Do you like Chopin?”

“As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls.”

“pink hamster’ recently criticized for not knowing what the word ‘meta’ means practicing a LOOKBOOK.nu pose titled ‘Practicing A LOOKBOOK.nu Pose In Anticipation of a Rumored LOOKBOOK.nu for Hamsters’ in anticipation of a rumored LOOKBOOK.nu for hamsters worried that LOOKBOOK.nu for hamsters will never be created and beginning to think (causing its eyes to unfocus slightly) of another way to show that it knows what the word ‘meta’ means and if maybe there’s a way to incorporate all of this, as it is, without the existence of LOOKBOOK.nu for hamsters, into one thing that would show to its detractors that it definitely knows what the word ‘meta’ means”

“does a society exist where it's become acceptable to wear 'helmets' enclosing one's entire head when in public to preempt social interaction”

“In the parking lot, she drove and parked in a dark area with no other cars around. She reclined her seat, and listened to music. Outside there were trees, a ditch, a bridge; another parking lot. It was very dark. Maybe the Sasquatch would run out from the woods. Chelsea wouldn’t be afraid. She would calmly watch the Sasquatch jog into the ditch then out, hairy and strong and mysterious—to be so large yet so unknown; how could one cope except by running?—smash through some bushes, and sprint, perhaps, behind Wal-Mart, leaping over a shopping cart and barking. Did the Sasquatch bark? It used to alarm Chelsea that this might be all there was to her life, these hours alone each day and night—thinking things and not sharing them and then forgetting—the possibility of that would shock her a bit, trickily, like a three-part realization: that there was a bad idea out there; that that bad idea wasn’t out there, but here; and that she herself was that bad idea. But recently, and now, in her car, she just felt calm and perceiving, and a little consoled, even, by the sad idea of her own life, as if it were someone else’s, already happened, in some other world, placed now in the core of her, like a pillow that was an entire life, of which when she felt exhausted by aloneness she could crumple and fall towards, like a little bed, something she could pretend, and believe, even (truly and unironically believe; why not?), was a real thing that had come from far away, through a place of no people, a place of people, and another place of no people, as a gift, for no occasion, but just because she needed—or perhaps deserved; did the world try in that way? to make things fair?—it.”

“Colin didn’t want to go back to his room. He walked around for a very long time, looking down at the sidewalks and streets, and thought of the things he and Dana might say to each other if she were with him. And every once in a while he would catch himself smiling and laughing a little, and it was those moments right after—as, having lapsed into fantasy, there was a correction, a moment of nothing and then a loose and sudden rush, back into the real world in a trick of escape, as if to some new place of possibilities—that he felt at once, and with clarity, most exhilarated, appreciative, disappointed, and accepting.”

“There was a metal rod inside of Colin. The rod went from his stomach to the middle of his head. It was made of steel and sugar, and had been dissolving inside of Colin for ten or fifteen years, slow and sweet, above and behind his tongue; and he could taste it in that way, like an aftertaste, removed and seeping and outside of the mouth. Sometimes he’d glimpse it with the black, numb backs of his eyes. But what he really wanted was to wrench it out. Cut it up and chew it. Or melt it. Bathe in the hard, sweet lava of it.”

“Garret went across the street to the library. There was a hole in the sidewalk the size of a bathtub. Construction was being done, was always being done. It was the journey that mattered, Garret thought woozily, the getting-there part. The mayor, and then the president, had begun saying that. "And where are we going?" the mayor had asked. "When will we get there? What will happen to us once we get there?" He really wanted to know.”

“The Gorilla Foundation, like a tree or cloud or other thing from nature, seems to mostly present itself only to an ideal, abstract, fully internalized audience—one that does not question sincerity or intent, that does not require justification or meaning, that would rather The Gorilla Foundation not pause (to defend itself, to allow others time to comprehend it) but to continue always with what it’s already doing. In this manner The Gorilla Foundation exists more in actualization of itself than in opposition to something else, which implies, to some degree, that it doesn’t earnestly believe it—or anything—“needs” to exist or is “right” or “wrong,” rather that its “mission” is a temporary concept, created by itself to directionalize itself, that without which [The Gorilla Foundation] wouldn’t exist.”

“Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and waiting as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.”

“I won,” said Chelsea’s dad, and went to give Chelsea a high-five, but missed, as they were standing too close.“My fault,” he said. “That was my fault.”“Oh,” Chelsea said.And he stepped back a little and tried again, but Chelsea, distracted now by something—maybe the plant in the far corner, standing and waiting like a person in a dream; or maybe the green shoe or some other thing that was out there and longing, to be looked at, and taken—wasn’t ready, and their hands, his then hers, passed through the air in a kind of wave, a little goodbye.”

“note the similarities with buddhisma buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sadprimarily because it does not know the conceptof sad [...]”

“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.”

“But then his parents changed. A year of California had changed them. They stopped sending money. Greg was forced to go out into the world, to interact with real people. And he was glad of this. He had always wanted to be a normal person. To be at ease in society. He had just been too scared to try. But now he was forced to, and so he did–he went and got a job at the public library. He was not quite a librarian, but close. Greg was a shelver. There would be carts of books to shelve, then there would be no more carts of books to shelve, then there would be carts of books to shelve.As a shelver, Greg felt that life was passing him by in a slow and distant, but massive, way–like the moon.”

“A world without right or wrong was a world that did not want itself, anything other than itself, or anything not those two things, but that still wanted something. A world without right or wrong invited you over, complained about you, and gave you cookies. Don't leave, it said, and gave you a vegan cookie. It avoided eye contact, but touched your knee sometimes. It was the world without right or wrong. It didn't have any meaning. It just wanted a little meaning.”

“There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.”

“Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn't be moose there and the moose would fall.”

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

“Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.”

“He used to think things like, This organic soymilk will make me healthy and that'll make my brain work better and that'll improve my writing. Also things like, The less I eat the less money I spend on publicly owned companies the less pain and suffering will exist in the world. Now he thinks things like, It is impossible to be happy. Why would anyone think that? ”

“Matt would stare at Andrew for 10 minutes. It's depressing that people are different. Everyone should be one person, who should then kill itself in hand-to-hand combat.”

“Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.”

“loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shapeof a helicopter the same size as the helicopterand that's it's only skilland it isn't good enoughbut it's still amazing.”

“We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.”

“Do you sometimes look up from the computer and look around the room and know you are alone, I mean really know it, then feel scared ?”

“It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else–pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.”

“Amoeba ass is so hot.”

“You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.”

“...one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in the froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie-ed river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out, gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled–having allowed to be consoled–by the soft, generous, worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.”