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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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Tao Lin
Age: 41
Born: 1983
Born: July 2
Novelist
Poet
Writer
City of Alexandria
Virginia
Seems
Done
Would
Life
Concretely
Like
Treated
People
Agree
Based
Lives

More quotes by Tao Lin

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We have been sitting here all night bullshitting and we still don’t know what to do.
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I cried when my ex-girlfriend sent me a text message saying how much she liked my present to her.
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But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. It just went away after a while.
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Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn't be moose there and the moose would fall.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Do you sometimes look up from the computer and look around the room and know you are alone, I mean really know it, then feel scared ?
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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.
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I actually don't have...opinions. I'm not being secretive about anything. I just actually don't have opinions about society. I can discern that certain things have an effect on certain other things but I don't view those effects as good or bad.
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I just don't feel good if I'm repeating myself.
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.
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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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Regarding drugs: just the existence of drugs seems troubling to me.
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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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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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.
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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 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