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Post Modernism Quotes

Browse 23 quotes about Post Modernism.

Post Modernism Quotes

“I remember waking in a field. The sun is above me. It has a face but not like mine. Its eyes are closed. I'm wearing a gown made of the hair we'd never grown. The gown stretches behind me as I walk, winding and clinging against the landscape as if to wed me to it. It pulls the roots of my scalp so wide and far apart you can see straight into my brain, the mounds and nubs there, holes and powder. Beneath the dirt, the blood is dry. Enmassed dreams of the dead hold up the lattice of the unnamed landscape. Where I'd already walked I knew I could not walk back. The light of day is near and thin with no one waiting.”

DeathHumanityLonelinessEndlessMetaphysicsPost ModernismHuman ExtinctionBlake ButlerPost Post ModernismThree Hundred Million
Book:Three Hundred Million
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“Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He’s needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O’Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg’s shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism of his organs.”

HumorDfwPost Modernism
Book:Girl With Curious Hair
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“For all our modernist beliefs in truth, evidence, logic, and fairness, perhaps we have reached a point of no return in the writing of history where modern progressives attack the historical record with malice aforethought, leaving us stupider than we were before this movement took shape in the 1960s, when the twentysomething Hochschild was at the barricades protesting Vietnam and all the rest. It is for future generations to re-colonize history using the precious intellectual resources of the Enlightenment. Until then, we do well to fight the progressive warlords like Hochschild who enslave formerly colonized peoples in distorted victimization narratives that rob them of agency, all the while keeping the white man front and center.”

ColonialismModernismLeopold IiAdam HochschildLeopold S GhostPost Modernism
Book:King Hochschild’s Hoax: An absurdly deceptive book on Congolese rubber production is better described as historical fiction.
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“The uniform is that which we do not choose, that which is assigned to us; it is the certitude of the universal against the precariousness of the individual. When the values that were once so solid come under challenge and withdraw, heads bowed, he who cannot live without them (without fidelity, family, country, discipline, without love) buttons himself up in the universality of his uniform as if that uniform were the last shred of transcendence that could protect him against the cold of a future in which there will be nothing left to respect.”

ValuesIndividualUniversalExistentialismUniformPost ModernismSleepwalkersPasenowEsch
Book:The Art of the Novel
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“Worse than knowing I needed out, I didn't know what I needed back into. Even when I could feel there was something else beyond the edges of any color in the street or window where no one waited even to just totally ignore me, I couldn't recognize it enough to know how to want it harder. Along each street it was as if I were waiting for some hole to swallow my face. Each moment it didn't made the going into the next step that much less worth doing. This is what life had always felt like. In my mind, expecting the absence of something or someone there before me made the presence in its place feel like the punch line to a routine no one was performing. And where I couldn't find a way to laugh, I became my own stand-in, over and over, like painting white over a window from the inside.”

FictionPost ModernismExperimentalPost Modern000300Blake ButlerThree Hundred Million
Book:Three Hundred Million
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“Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.”

ModernismMahlerPost ModernismKlimtFin De SiècleStrauss
Book:The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
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“I teach art at a famous art school, and yet I don't have really the least notion what post-modernism means, but we have people in the letters and science department that understand it quite well and the students go there if they want to understand what this term that is being bandied about is all about, but I've never understood it.”

PeopleIfsWantWellsMeanArtSchoolTermTeachStudentsUnderstoodLettersNotionPostsDepartmentModernismArt SchoolPost Modernism
Author:Lawrence Jordan
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“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”

ThinkingKnowsMenLoveStillsPastSilenceAttitudeWrittenModernLove YouSolutionsDestructionDestroyedIronyRecognizingModernismPostmodernismBarbaraPostmodernPost Modernism
Book:Postscript to The name of the rose
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“The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.”

GivingSometimesDoneSeemsFormDesireArtistModernPaintingIllusionLongingCreatorRagePityPostsCollaborationGood WillModernismPost Modernism
Author:John Berger
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