Chuck Klosterman · 245 pages
Rating: (24.5K votes)
“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you play the stereo at max volume, it's almost like the other people can't see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“It feels so exhausting to be so bad at something I loved so much.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“…I have never understood the concept of infatuation. It has always been my understanding that being ‘infatuated’ with someone means you think you are in love, but you’re actually not; infatuation is (supposedly) just a foolish, fleeting feeling. But if being ‘in love’ is an abstract notion, and it’s not tangible, and there is no way to physically prove it to anyone else… well, how is being in love any different than having an infatuation? They’re both human constructions. If you think you’re in love with someone and you feel like you’re in love with someone, then you obviously are; thinking and feeling is the sum total of what love is. Why do we feel an obligation to certify emotions with some kind of retrospective, self-imposed authenticity?”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“...because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation. It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“But I still feel like I lost.
We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in the sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet. probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real-but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“I am ready to be alone.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“Styx and The Stones may break my bones but 'More than Words' will never hurt me”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington DC it just sort of works out that way.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence. For example, infants who die from SIDs were actually great people when they were alive for real, so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile anyone Willard Scott ever congratulated for turning one hundred two was obviously a terrible individual who had many many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her own unknown purgatory even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“The stark, pedestrian images used by filmmakers (probably out of financial necessity) expressed nothing, symbolically or metaphorically. The only purpose they served was to remind me that a huge chunk of my life is completely over, even though I will probably live 60 more years. There are so many things that will never happen to me again, and I never even noticed when those things stopped occurring. And this does not mean I wish I had my old life back, because I like my new life better; I was just shocked to discover how much of what used to be central to my existence doesn't even matter to me anymore.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“My mind and gut are never simpatico: Every time I think somebody likes me, she doesn't; every time I think somebody doesn't like me, she does. This has never changed and I'm certain it never will.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“As of right now, I am in love with her, and that love is the biggest problem in my life.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“We’re all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of. As far as I’m concerned, the dinosaurs still hold the lease on this godforsaken rock.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“The year you spent ‘killing yourself’
to make me love you…I thought that was us being best friends. We had all those intimate conversations and you sent me all those long e-mails and we watched all those movies involving Eric
Stoltz—I thought that was us having fun. But you see that kind of behavior as the work you’re forced to do in order to sleep with the people you want to sleep with.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you’re
sharing a reality that doesn’t exist.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“There are very few Americans who honestly care who Lindsay Lohan is dating. But it’s still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they’re worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something that they’re missing.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“I tend to equate sadness with intelligence.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“I have more CDs than 99 percent of America, but fewer CDs than 40 percent of my friends; if an acquaintance has more CDs than me, I feel intimidated and emasculated. I think about my CDs a lot. I find it oddly reassuring to look at them when I'm intoxicated.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
“Sid and Nancy's relationship forever illustrates the worst part of being in love with anyone, which is that people in love can't be reasoned with.”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
Chuck Klosterman
Born place: in Breckenridge, Minnesota, The United States
Born date June 5, 1972
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“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.”
― Martha Gellhorn, quote from Selected Letters
“mad maddie: zoe, angela is her own worst enemy, you know. zoegirl: i love her so much, but i do kind of understand what you’re saying. but i don’t know how to tell her that to her face. i don’t even know if i want to say it to her face. mad maddie: i do. i just wanna shake her shoulders and say, “GET A CLUE! HE IS A LOSER!!!” zoegirl: i know. it’s so sad. mad maddie: yeah, but it’s also just ANNOYING.”
― Lauren Myracle, quote from ttyl
“ The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
― Ronald Takaki, quote from A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
“Help me, O Lord, that my eyes may be merciful, so that I may never suspect or judge from appearances, but look for what is beautiful in my neighbors’ souls and come to their rescue.”
― Maria Faustina Kowalska, quote from Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul
“An endless number of these unmade connections exist to this day, especially in the business world. You are surrounded by simple, obvious solutions that can dramatically increase your income, power, influence, and success. The problem is, you just don’t see them. I”
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