Matthew Hinea > Matthew's Quotes

“To live is enough.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“The feelings that hurt most, the motions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it.”
― Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee

“Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“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.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.”
― Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee

“Matt would stare at Andrew for 10 minutes. It's depressing that people are different. Everyone should be one person, who should then kill itself in hand-to-hand combat.”
― Tao Lin

“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.”
― Tao Lin, this emotion was a little e-book

“He used to think things like, This organic soymilk will make me healthy and that'll make my brain work better and that'll improve my writing. Also things like, The less I eat the less money I spend on publicly owned companies the less pain and suffering will exist in the world. Now he thinks things like, It is impossible to be happy. Why would anyone think that? ”
― Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee

“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.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“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, Taipei

“There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.”
― Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee

“...one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always trying to seize the days like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in the froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie-ed river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out, gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled–having allowed to be consoled–by the soft, generous, worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“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 ?”
― Tao Lin, Shoplifting from American Apparel

“You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“But if someone had slowed him down, just slightly interrupted his course, maybe he could have gotten through that one nightmarish moment; maybe he would never get that close to it again.”
― Frederick Barthelme, Elroy Nights

“If you don't try, nothing ever changes.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it.”
― Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories