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Eating the Dinosaur QUOTES

Eating the Dinosaur QUOTES

21 " Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

22 " The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

23 " Twelve Monkeys makes a lot of references to the “Cassandra complex” (named for a Greek myth about a young woman’s inability to convince others that her prophetic warnings are accurate), but it’s mostly about predestination—in Twelve Monkeys, the assumption is that anyone who travels into the past will do exactly what history dictates. Nothing can be altered. What this implies is that everything about life (including the unforeseen future) is concrete and predetermined. There is no free will. So if you’ve seen Twelve Monkeys more than twice, you’re probably a Calvinist. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

24 " When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the 'presidential greatness poll' in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

25 " But when you’re naturally better than everyone else, and when that talent is so utterly obvious, being quiet doesn’t translate as humble. It translates as boredom. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

26 " I don’t think we have any idea who we are. I think we’re engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

27 " Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people3 want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it’s interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

28 " Not all crazy people are brilliant, but almost all brilliant people are crazy. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

29 " Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

30 " The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, thereby allowing himself to die in an accident he had previously avoided. By removing himself from the equation, he never meets his new girlfriend, which keeps her from dying in a car accident that was his fault. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

31 " But regardless of the direction you move, the central problem is still there: Why do it? What’s the best reason for exploding the parameters of reality? With the possible exception of eating a dinosaur, I don’t think there is one. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

32 " According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel—it’s too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

33 " The defining line from Frank Herbert’s Dune argues that the mystery of life “is not a question to be answered but a reality to be experienced.” My fantasy offers the opposite. Nothing would be experienced. Nothing would feel new or unknown or jarring. It’s a fantasy for people who want to solve life’s mysteries without having to do the work. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

34 " This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who’s intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can’t see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

35 " Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

36 " The mere recognition of an extrinsic reality damages the intrinsic merits of one’s own reality. In other words, it’s a mistake to (consciously) do what everyone else is doing, just as it’s a mistake to (consciously) do the opposite. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

37 " There’s even an 1892 novel called Golf in the Year 2000 that (somewhat incredibly) predicts the advent of televised sports. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

38 " The solution to this paradox (according to Palahniuk) is the theory of splintered alternative realities, where all possible trajectories happen autonomously and simultaneously (sort of how Richard Linklater describes The Wizard of Oz to an uninterested cab driver in the opening sequence of Slacker). "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

39 " I always thought the time machine is the device that’s missed most. Without even saying it out loud, that’s the thing people want the most: The ability to take whatever it is that went wrong and fix it. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur

40 " If you know exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow, the voltage of that experience is immediately mitigated. "

― Chuck Klosterman , Eating the Dinosaur