Postmodern Quotes

“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick

“No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.”
― Umberto Eco

“Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.”
― D. Harlan Wilson, The Kyoto Man

“Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."

I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.

Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

“The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Postmodernism has turned into this devil's vortex where no matter what you do, your neck will be turned and your face shoved into a foreign example, and worse, no matter what you say, despite the context, it will be considered a postmodern device. That's the danger of postmodernism: it poses itself as something that can't be trumped, something you can’t escape. It continually mocks your efforts for the sake of its name. I know even this will be seen as another postmodern bullet, and no matter what I say, critics and readers will be locked into how to lock me in.”
― Brian Celio, Catapult Soul

“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.”
― David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

“For official record, announce instructor, the state requires no epic hero. No strive achieve personal celebrity of spotlight and applause. Lectures instructor, the state desires best ideal perform as mediocre. No gain attention showboat. No buffoon. Best effort so occur average. Suppress climbing ego. Become ordinary. Invisible.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”
― Robert Rauschenberg

“Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. So completely forgetting that when I say choose to you you make expressions with your face such as “Herrrrrre we are going.” Someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And no map for finding the shelter of a temple. And you all stumble about in the dark, this confusion of permissions.”
― David Foster Wallace.

“The words marriage and divorce were always used together, like they went hand in hand together.”
― Jess C. Scott, Playmates

“Atomize and refigure the word.”
― Christopher H. Sartisohn, Gargoyle Hotel

“So who is cruel? You, cruel reader, you are.”
― Johnny Rich, The Human Script

“...Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.
The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“Pod kvazi-mitskim totalitetom tehničke racionalnosti prijeti nam inteligencija bez patosa, inteligencija kojoj nije potreban nikakav jezik koji ima svoj vlastiti smisao jer ionako sve funkcionira bez bilo kakvog proturječja; ta inteligencija ne zna za spomen jer nije ugrožena nikakvim zaboravom: čovjek kao kompjuterizirana inteligencija bez osjetljivosti na patnju i bez morala, ukratko: čovjek kao rapsodija nedužnosti jednoga glatko funkcionirajućeg stroja. Treba li doista to biti čovjek nakon smrti čovjeka?”
― Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft

“Reagan’s easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.”
― Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology

“Here we are in the century of information, that is to say the unformed. Every kind of literature will be journalistic, with a science for ballast.”
― Julien Torma

“Nel momento in cui riconosceva quello che c'era su una cartuccia provava la sensazione carica d'ansia che ci fosse qualcosa di meglio su un'altra cartuccia e che potenzialmente se lo stava perdendo. Poi si rese conto che avrebbe avuto tutto il tempo di godersi ogni cartuccia e capì intellettualmente che non aveva senso provare il panico di perdersi qualcosa.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“—Now please please no please don’t tell me now Crow Books, too…?  I loved that place, the paperbacks shoved behind the other paperbacks on the metal racks because there wasn’t space, the mostly sense that they just want to have all those nice books in there for you, waiting for you if you want - need - to discover something, and the bad lighting, and the rumply chair with its bottom rupturing stuff, and Mr. Shelling and his rectangular mustache and no employee recommendations and discovering Denis Johnson and Virgin Suicides and I just can’t, I can’t—”
― Evan Dara, Flee

“However, as Bordo herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers to disregard the materiality of power relations.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“I find it hard to harness respect for those who genuinely believe that postmodernity, whatever it may be, allows us to claim no roots.”
― Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

“Kapangyarihan," impit ang salitang hinugot niya sa kaloob-looban. "May taglay akong kapangyarihan...," bumuntunghininga siya, tinitigan ang mga babaeng naghihintay ng sasabihin niya. "Kapangyarihang magpatayo ng titi." (p. 20)”
― Mayette M. Bayuga, Sa Amin, Sa Dagat-Dagatang Apoy

“When I take my old copies of the phenomenologies of religion down from the shelf and thumb through their pages, I feel as if I were walking through the halls of abandoned buildings. My graduate school notes lie heavy in the margins, like scrawls of graffiti on the walls, attesting to the fact that human once contested these spaces. I wonder, each time I close one of these volumes and put it back on the shelf, whether the puff of dust that arises from its binding is not a reminder that systems are built to crumble, and the grander the system, the more spectacular the fall.”
― Malcom David Eckel

“Tenemos una sociedad de subnormales, y por eso la gente actúa como lo hace, y se hace lo que se hace.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“What we are witnessing is the failure of humanistic, postmodern, and pluralistic worldviews to see beyond the horizon of their own worldview.”
― Shahar Rabi , Spiritual Misfits: Collaboration and Belonging in a Divisive World

“On the doorsill the Paranoids, as we leave milk to propitiate the leprechaun, had set a fifth of Jack Daniels.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“All my words are true...Because I make them and believe what they make. If I did not believe the things which I see in my mind, how could those that listen believe in them? So my stories are true.”
― Edward Pearson, Chamiel