Tony Tulathimutte > Quotes

“It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“It's not that I have a way with words; it's that I have no way without them.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“Identity is diet history, single serving sociology; at its worst, a partriotism of trauma, or a prothesis of personality. Privilege discourse a well-meaning attempt to balance scales that have become tainted, like most things American, by the puritanical paradigm of original sin.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“Here finally Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn't know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible. You can't own it or laugh it off, only try to bail it out in sloshing bucketfuls, drenching yourself in the process. Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition, one that Julian has somehow either mastered or never experienced, which explains why he's so easygoing, and why, to him, the world is so tractable, why all seems fixable with talk. What's inside Julian is smooth and fragrant, his desires desirable, and so his words are gift wrap, sometimes sloppy but always appreciated. Whereas if Kant ever relaxes his vigilance, allows his own sick and malign requirements to escape through the candor of voice or touch, they could never be recontained.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“I loved Twitter: an open, rhizomatic forum where you could aggravate existing mental illnesses, shop for new ones, violate your Miranda rights, and get fired. A place to be judged on the character of your content, driven by rubbernecking and spite, where fame is a millstone and names are bad op-sec. Twitter was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter, screaming for territory and mates. An improv class, press conference, intervention, Klan rally, comics convention, and struggle session all booked in the same conference room.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“The annoying thing about disagreeing with libs is they tend to assume you’re either to their right, or misinformed and in urgent need of enlightenment.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“The one thing in this dumbass world I hate most is emotional coercion; having it insinuated with tender concern that the way I feel about things is unreasonable, and if they validate me enough, I’ll eventually agree with them in return, and moreover feelings themselves must always be disciplined to fall in line with agreed-upon scruples. Adjust in the name of compromise! But I’m always the only one who ends up adjusting.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Even looking past the internet-borne tendency for writers of your generation to ass-cover with tedious disclaimers, the real point, we think, is to foreclose scrutiny, to get ahead of rejection by naming your sins before any reader has a chance to. But this perverse apologizing only feels like you're cutting and chewing our meat for us, and we reject you (literally) all the harder.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Still, the school ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values. It had been cool, or at least normal, to identify as asexual.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“She turned to enter a stall, lowered to her knees, and made the familiar pattern of motions, hair pushed back and three fingers snaked into her mouth, repeating nothing in her head as she sang out her stomach. As it splashed and clouded out below her, she remembered how virtuous and light it felt to have done thing. Thought not while you did it. Then you were alone and it always hurt.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“So the convention sucks, the alternative sucks; what’s the alternative to the alternative? I’ve looked for it my whole life. And”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“I now saw the peril of forging a persona to escape all assignations, only to end up searing it into yourself. Not for nothing is it called a brand.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“No better place to find people when the people I wanted to find were people who, like me, wanted to find people who don't want to be found. People like me, who like people who don't like people like me.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“In my hundreds of hours of research, I've often paused to question the worth of deep dives like this, and have never been able to convincingly justify my involvement in the lives of these people I've never met, ones who might not even exist. Is it nothing but a folk version of reality television? Or has the evolutionary drive to seek social instruction by observing and interpreting the behavior of others hypertrophied beyond usefulness, such that now, in our binges of drama, to watch ourselves watch someone else watch us has become an end in itself? An end without end?”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“This is why my interest is not in identity politics so much as identity terrorism.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Grrr, friend-zoned again!” he says, shaking his fists toward the ceiling”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Part of me genuinely wanted to try to explain how there existed two adversarial factions of female leftist cumposters, one that posted about being bimbo throat-goats who wanted their big naturals blasted with cum but also wanted insulin to be state-subsidized, vs. the theorypilled cynics whose political acumen and hotness and crassness were part of a larger project of licensing ridicule, and how one of the latter did a mean quote-tweet of one of the former, which in each of their camps set off a chain of subtweets and retaliations and excavations of past racist tweets and micropartisan wagon-circling that accomplished nothing but to till the soil for future clashes and demonstrate how far beyond salvation everyone was, including, especially, obviously, me.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“And learning any fact, he was annoyed not to have known it already, because whenever anything happened, the conversation around it had already trended and backlashed and been reexamined and swalloed and shat and reswallowed and reshat in a thousand places onlines, until all thinking felt redundant”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“great job combating white patriarchy when anti-PC panics have been the most effective right-wing propaganda against the left in every iteration of the culture wars,”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“But I hate having my life judged as the output of generic forces, that however I understand or react to them is secondary to the fact that I share them with others. Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“she’s forced to choose between self-respect and peace of mind, when each requires the other, so it is a choice between nothing and nothing.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“The worst feeling in the world is winning the patronizing approval of someone so, so stupid.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“You think every functioning couple knows themselves and expresses what they want and hears what the other is saying perfectly? That we're not pumping everyone else full of prejudices and fantasies with no connection to reality? The only thing holding relationships together is intention. It's not a matter of fact or reason. We get to say what happened because we're the only ones who care.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens

“But the best ones are those dauntless donuts and gormless corncobs yanking full force at their fingertraps, who triple-down and rearrange their whole belief systems around their stupidest opinions just to avoid publicly admitting they’re wrong, and by day’s end find themselves unemployed and divorced with 50,000 Blackpink stans skywriting their Social Security number.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“You've tried worms and string, bow and arrows, a bamboo spear, a two-hundred-dollar carbon fiber rod, dragnets, dynamite, and your bare hands. You can't catch a break. Every lure, every lake, no luck. There's so many of them, slick, fat, and iridescent, and you are starving. But what matters least is what the fisherman wants.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“—but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us, whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

“Understand this is no confession. I never got the point of online apologies, this notion that you're accountable to strangers who aren't affected and maybe wouldn't have even known of your offense, had you not apologized. I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we've installed in other people's heads. but real accountability requires a community. Online you can meet people, hang out, hook up, meet your soulmate, but it's not a community. In a real community bonds are hard to dissolve and antagonisms must be sustained, there's continuity, and unavoidable neighbors. The internet is millions of solitudes blinking in and out of existence, each dreaming the others, where "consensus reality" is less an agreed-upon reality than a reality made of agreement. With identity it's the same—this idea that a checkbox on a form is a service tunnel to a stranger's soul. People will always fall for it.”
― Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection