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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
Brain
Persons
Encased
Person
Skull
People
Skulls
Connected
Took
Effort
Alive

More quotes by 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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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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One seemed simply to be here, less an accumulation of moments than a single arrangement continuously gifted from some inaccessible future.
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 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 just keep investing in the future, and I haven't reached the point where I'm not doing that.
Tao Lin
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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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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 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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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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Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon.
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 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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Focusing on being a person instead of an Asian or an [anything] seems to promote a worldview that encourages people to treat others based on what each person has specifically done in their life, which seems like it would reduce such things as war, racism, unfairness, hate crimes, [other things most people feel aversion toward].
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
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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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On average, since the urge to kill myself isn't so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.
Tao Lin
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It seems like most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives.
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