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“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“While I still don’t wanna hear how everything is hunky-dory like a lot of those disco people and Barry Manilows are trying to sell us, I’m just completely fed up with cheap stupid nihilism especially when it starts acting trendy. I know society is sick and life is getting more complicated by the second, but if all you’ve got to say is get fucked life sucks you stink I stink who cares I’m bored whip me beat me kick me there's nothing else to do then I think you and everybody else would be a lot better off if you just kept your fucking mouth shut in the first place, not to mention your self-destructive habits to yourself instead of parading them around like The Red Badge of Courage or something. And this isn’t like If You Can’t Say Anything Nice Don’t Say Anything At All, it's more like… why restate what's been said and refuted already?”
― Lester Bangs, Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader

“The great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague