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Tao Lin Quotes

Total quotes: 19
“Imagine if species of plants had as much advertising every year as brands of drugs.”
— Tao Lin
Tagged: plants, Advertising, Tree Hugging
“My tears felt dense and complex as blood.”
— Tao Lin, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Tears, Blood, Examples of Metaphors
“Psychedelics catalyze change, but not indefinitely and not without concurrent strategies.”
— Tao Lin, How I Got Off Adderall And Xanax Using Psilocybin
“When writing a book, I think of the people who will read it twice or more, not the people who will read it once.”
— Tao Lin
Tagged: Writing A Book, Figuring Out Who You Are Writing For, Write A Book, Writing & Expression
“I felt myself leaving Earth in an intimidatingly disquieting manner, like I was on a vessel I hadn’t suspected to exist, departing a place I’d assumed was the only place.”
— Tao Lin, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Tagged: Drug Experiences, Leave Earth, Psychedelics, Mushrooms, Quote of the Moment, Going There, Beyond Earth, NASA’s Avant-Garde
“I’ve become increasingly interested in the idea that ‘the imagination’ is a place that is realer and larger than the universe.”
— Tao Lin, Tao Lin On Why He Writes
Tagged: NASA’s Avant-Garde, Imagination, Quote of the Moment
“It seems better to learn about people by interacting with them instead of coming at them with possible misconceptions.”
— Tao Lin, Tao Lin On Why He Writes
Tagged: Don't Judge, Accept People On Their Own Terms, Getting To Know People
“I view language and life as two entirely separate things, with different properties.”
— Tao Lin, Tao Lin On Why He Writes
Tagged: Life and Literature, Words Aren't Reality
“I support the prehistoric burial method excarnation where the body is left outside on a platform for birds to eat then the bones are buried.”
— Tao Lin
Tagged: Burial Rituals, What To Do With Your Body (When You're Dead)
“The word technology is used in the book to mean something like ‘the non-circular, linear-seeming aspect of a system.’”
— Tao Lin, Interview | Tao Lin | Granta Magazine
Tagged: The Essence of Technology, Technological Being
“His memories had increasingly occurred to him without context, outside of linear time, like single poems on sheets of computer paper, instead of pages from a book with the page number and book title on top.”
— Tao Lin, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Memory, Time, How Time Works, Time Warps, Against The Linear
“Sometimes you had to be a little bit insane. You had to say, 'Give me that. Let me do it.' You had to take things from the world and bend them and then put them back in the world, bent like that.”
— Tao Lin, Insomnia For A Better Tomorrow
Tagged: Control, Asserting Control, Learning, Hands-on
“Feels like I 'only' want to convey incredibly powerful, convincing, unceasing messages of I don't know and I have nothing to say to you.”
— Tao Lin, Twitter (5 Mar 2011)
Tagged: No Communication, Broken Language, No Bridge, I Don't Know
“I’ve thought about the CIA probably targeting me, or having someone ‘keep tabs’ on me, but I like that.”
— Tao Lin, Observing the Art Appear From Nowhere: Tao Lin's Addiction to Terence McKenna
Tagged: CIA
“He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place— in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb— to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin, at some point, to think about what to do about himself.”
— Tao Lin, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Disappear Here
“A long-term strategy I have for staying disciplined and motivated is to keep learning about the ways in which my mind and body have been damaged from trillions of dollars of advertisements, thousands of synthetic compounds, multigenerational malnourishment, an unnatural microbiome, and other things new to the human species, and to continue increasing my understanding of what I can do to heal myself gradually years and decades.”
— Tao Lin, Tao Lin On Why He Writes
Tagged: Multigenerational Damage, Discipline, What Has Been Done To Us
“On a Megabus to New York City — for around fifteen hours, due to a two-hour delay in Buffalo — he read all he could find by Alethia on the internet, becoming more “obsessed,” he felt, after each article, lying on his back across two seats with knees bent, twice dropping his iPhone onto his face. His interest in Alethia naturally decreased, the next few days, then they texted a few times and he felt renewed obsession, but he didn’t like her impersonal tone in their emails discussing their interview— which she’d spent eight hours transcribing— and, less than a week after they met, all he felt toward her, to his weak amusement, was an unexamined combination of indifference and vague resentment, which he described in an email to Charles, whose previous knowledge of Alethia was that Paul liked her “a lot,” as “strong aversion,” only half joking. Paul’s next email to Charles said “I feel like I ‘hate’ her” and that it seemed, by the bureaucratic language and curtness of Alethia’s emails, like she also “hated” him, that they “hated” each other.”
— Tao Lin, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: The Bends of Liking Someone
“After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing resolution, to accumulate and expand, until his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same songlike beating— of another, larger, protective heart— inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things, mostly from his childhood.”
— Tao Lin, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Drug Experiences, Childhood Memories
“With my recent book, I used drugs in a regimented manner most of the time. My goal was to create a steady, reliable state of consciousness within which I could work 6-13 hours a day, unlike with Taipei which I wrote staying up 2-3 days working and then feeling unable to do anything for like 3-10 days. I get much more work done with a daily schedule than with the bleak method I used with Taipei.”
— Tao Lin, Tao Lin On Why He Writes
Tagged: Drug Usage, Schedules
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