In sum, then a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity and TV's institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis. It's not our fault! It's outmoded technology's fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to "institutionalize" anything through its demonic "mass psychology"! Let's let Joe B., the little lonely guy, be his own manipulator or video-bits! Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself, in the privacy of his very own home and skull, TV's ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cajones will be broken! " E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993) . David Foster Wallace
Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.
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Douglas Coupland
The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[ But]...
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Haruki Murakami
The irony of life is that those who wear masks often tell us more truths than those with open faces.
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Marie Lu
Thank heaven for people who are satisfied with facts that conform to the reality they wish to believe.
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Gary Inbinder
Even things that are true can be proved.
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Oscar Wilde
More Quotes By David Foster Wallace
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’...
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>And...
Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?"" I give."" You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one...
