Evan Puschak > Quotes

“The world lit up with questions, and questions generated questions. It’s an exhilarating and terrifying experience to walk the road of your ignorance. Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but of watching it shrink against all there is to know.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“in between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I’m happy, and that’s all I want…”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“You can fashion a world from a handful of words.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“We don't want the fantasy. We want to fantasize.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“What we don't preserve will eventually vanish. What we have preserved says as much about us as it does about [the thing we preserved], what we recognize as significant.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Paired with loitering laws and sit-lie ordinances, hostile architecture aims to make public space unusable for those who need it most. It cruelly harms the homeless, without addressing the root causes of their predicament, and it makes the city feel unwelcome to all. Its effect, in other words, is the opposite of its foul intention.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“in art, you can indulge in the consolations reason denies in life.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“It is an exhilarating and terrifying experience to walk the road of your ignorance. Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but of watching it shrink against all there is to know.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Superman can thwart the hammer of evil, but Lois and Clark can go after the arm swinging it, and the system that grants it freedom of motion.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“I don’t think there is any objective purpose for humanity, or that there is a god of any kind. I don’t believe people have destinies. I think everything that’s happened since the Big Bang has happened by accident, following from physical laws that are inherently meaningless, like our lives.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“The best lack all conviction,” Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming,” “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Mulaney’s right: the bit has a lot going on beneath the surface. It speaks to our selfishness, our laziness, our child-like craving for fairness and revenge. It speaks to the ease with which we dehumanize others, and the system that makes it even easier by forcing us into transactional relationships. After all, it’s the theater company that rips us off, that sells us the “overpriced, oversized crap we shouldn’t be eating to begin with.” We get even by leaving our popcorn buckets behind, but it’s not the company that cleans our trash. It’s the minimum wage employee, who works two jobs just to keep her kids in school. But that doesn’t stop us, does it?”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“As the story becomes more familiar, as you absorb the nuances of [the author's] creation, that sensation of meaning grows. And if the numinous is what you're there for, rereads and rewatches become more gratifying, not less. You get to a point where holiness invigorates everything, like a dazzling inner glow.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“... but there I go, quoting again.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Extraordinary films transport you into their worlds, but with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner it was the opposite: the world of the film transported into me.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Bernard thinks about [these reflections on friendship] the most, almost to the point of obsession (which makes me wonder if I'm the Bernard of my friend group, zealously reading social science theory for corroboration of an eccentric intuition, while the others live their lives in peace, never thinking twice about what sort of sublime unity we form)... Maybe it's unnecessary to invoke science and fiction to justify my feelings about friendship. Maybe I ought to trust that my experience has value in itself.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Whyte says, “Places designed with distrust get what they were looking for.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Superficial joys are still joys, after all. They're 'pretty good' and pretty good is good enough.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“This emphasis on old wisdom creates a culture of 'bookworms,' not thinkers, 'meek young men [who] grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Think about it: there is no physicality to our thoughts. They don’t take up space (even if we sometimes use that metaphor to describe them). Thoughts happen in sequence, in time.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“retained a child’s inquisitiveness, and a child’s impatience with the moronic and the dull.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“good enough is all a relatively privileged kid has to be. I”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Cyberpunk is a space that affirms the essential meaninglessness of all things, a fantasy zone where it’s no longer necessary to work at finding a place in the world.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“It's an exhilarating and terrifying experience to walk the road of your ignorance. Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but of watching it shrink against all there is to know.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“When I feel good, I exploit the feeling for all it's worth. When I feel like shit, I batten down the hatches and hold on to my confidence that it will pass... eventually the fever broke as it always breaks, as some part of me knows it will. Good days came and went. I got to work. I finished it.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Bernard thinks about [these reflections] the most, almost to the point of possession (which makes me wonder if I'm the Bernard of my friend group, zealously reading social science theory for corroboration of an eccentric intuition, while the others live their lives in peace, never thinking twice about what sort of sublime unity we form).”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Caring about something so deeply felt rebellious.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Urban planning trains you to see the environment in one way, concealing alternative perspectives. But as soon as you break the rules, a new city snaps into focus, a new relationship with the environment becomes possible, obvious. Once people get a taste of something they like, something better, it becomes very difficult to take it away from them.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Enjoy the good, laugh at the bad. Accept that it comes as a set...”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

“Their presence is the mirror image of the Waynes’ absence.”
― Evan Puschak, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions