fuck yeah, chuck klosterman

Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who’s exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is boring as shit

There are so many things that will never happen to me again, and I never noticed when those things stopped occurring. And it does not mean I wish I had my old life back, because I like my new life better; I was just shocked to discover how much of what used to be central to my existence doesn’t even matter to me anymore.

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.

We all believe that we are a certain kind of person, but we never know until we do something that proves otherwise, or until we die.

The biggest factor in anyone’s success is chance. Nobody likes to admit that, because they want to believe they were smart and talented enough, or they busted their ass to get where they are. But chance is the biggest thing, and once you accept that, life seems scary.

People never care about things as much as they claim, or as much as they would like to pretend to themselves.

We are always dying, all the time. That’s what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

There are strings attached to every single lover, but still they can’t tether us together.

It makes me think about all the perfectly scribed love letters and drunken e-mails I have written over the past twelve years, and about all the various women who received them. I think about how I told them they changed the way I thought about the universe, and that they made every other woman on earth unattractive, and that I would love them unconditionally even if we were never together. I hate that those letters still exist. But I don’t hate them because what I said was false; I hate them because what I said was completely true. My convictions could not have been stronger when I wrote those words, and — for whatever reason — they still faded into nothingness. Three times I have been certain that I could never love anyone else, and I was wrong every time. Those old love letters remind me of my emotional failure and my accidental lies.

Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.