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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.

Tao Lin

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Tao Lin
Age: 41
Born: 1983
Born: July 2
Novelist
Poet
Writer
City of Alexandria
Virginia
Effort
Alive
Brain
Persons
Encased
Person
Skull
People
Skulls
Connected
Took

More quotes by Tao Lin

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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.
Tao Lin
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While other rich people might be like, Once I'm rich I'm going to go on a vacation to wherever, but instead they just keep wanting to be more rich. It just seems like it would be fun to do whatever you wanted. If I were really rich I would be flying places, I think.
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I think mostly the commodifying comes after I've done something that has some other value to me.
Tao Lin
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loneliness can fly a helicopter through a cut-out shape of a helicopter the same size as the helicopter and that's it's only skill and it isn't good enough but it's still amazing.
Tao Lin
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Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore.
Tao Lin
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I don't feel a connection with younger people or with Generation X, or any generation, I feel. If I felt a connection with people my age I wouldn't have written six books about feeling depressed, alienated, lonely. If I did I would have many friends and feel connected with them and probably be a happy person who has a real job.
Tao Lin
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I cried when my ex-girlfriend sent me a text message saying how much she liked my present to her.
Tao Lin
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I usually have Kafka biography in my bathroom. It's a book I can open at random and feel interested in immediately. It's really funny. With this book, since I'm opening it at random and immediately interested, I don't feel the need to read more than I want to read, in that there's not, like, a plot that leads me along. So I can stop whenever.
Tao Lin
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I just don't feel good if I'm repeating myself.
Tao Lin
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The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.
Tao Lin
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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.
Tao Lin
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If I focused hard on getting a literary agent, and doing things like that, instead of designing my blog's header, I would have more money, I think. I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view [anything] as part of being a person, so I feel okay with marketing or other things like that.
Tao Lin
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I don't know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I've read maybe one page of one of his books and didn't think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.
Tao Lin
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I think Gmail chats are different than IRL conversations because Gmail chats are saved by Gmail exactly as they occurred. I like texts and emails. Seems like I don't have anything to say that isn't obvious about texts, emails, and Gmail chats.
Tao Lin
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I think everyone is racist, to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at, but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.
Tao Lin
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My publisher had mailed [Bret Easton Ellis] Richard Yates. And when I talked to him he said he had read all my prose books. And he said something like, You got a lot of mileage out of Dakota Fanning.
Tao Lin
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I like reading books where people with a lot of money use it to do whatever they want. Like stay in expensive hotels and do whatever drugs they want and fly wherever they want.
Tao Lin
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I think I don't view myself as an author. I view myself as a person. I view anything as part of being a person, so I feel okay with marketing or other things like that.
Tao Lin
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If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.
Tao Lin
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We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.
Tao Lin