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Postmodernism Quotes

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Postmodernism Quotes

“Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced. For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.”

LifePhilosophyWisdomCultureFeminismModernityWomen S LiberationWestern CivilizationPopular CulturePostmodernismMaleness
Author:Tiffany Madison
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“I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.”

PlayFeelingsRomanceStrongActingEmotionAudienceStrengthEmotionalDramaDemandWeaknessRomanticLonelyWeakTheaterYoung AdultTheatreAloneSuspenseFakeDramaticMaskControlHidingPretendingForbiddenGothicFeelSelf ImageAlwaysPostmodernismHidePretendActorGothMasksPostmodernGothic RomanceActressDemandingEmotionlessForbidSternYoung Adult Gothic RomanceExactExactingFeelless
Book:Nightmarish Sacrifice
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“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

PhilosophyPostmodernismBorgesFoucaultPost Structuralism
Book:The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.”

LifePhilosophyReligionFaithBeliefAtheismCapitalismIslamMetaphysicsPostmodernismWestern WorldPragmatismWestern CultureIslamic TerrorismIslamismIslamic FundamentalismGrand NarrativesPhilosophical Scepticism
Book:The Meaning of Life
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“Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...”

LoveLifeDifferentSelfPlayRealityRomanceUnderstandingRelationshipsActingKnowledgeRolesRelationshipAwarenessIdentityLivingRomanticSelf AwarenessCrisisYoung AdultReal LifeSuspenseMaskLiveKnow YourselfGothicFactUnderstandKnowSelf ImagePostmodernismHideHiddenActorGothAwareMasksPostmodernPlayingGothic RomanceRoleEvenYoung Adult Gothic RomanceSelf Identity CrisisKnow Myself
Book:Nightmarish Sacrifice
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“And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself. But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...”

TryingRealPlayRealityRomanceLostPerfectSecretRolesMysteryIdentityRomanticPerfectionLonelyWho You AreStriveYoung AdultWho I AmObsessionMysteriousSuspenseMaskBe YourselfPretendingYourselfGothicObsessiveLoseTryPostmodernismHidePretendHiddenGothRealizeMasksSecretiveMyselfPostmodernGothic RomanceRoleCardewFreyaYoung Adult Gothic RomanceMaskedYoung Adult Suspense
Book:Nightmarish Sacrifice
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“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

TruthFilmScienceReligionFaithLiteraturePoliticsUnited StatesProgressAtheismSelf LoveEnlightenmentArgumentLiesHumanismConvictionRussiaSocialismJournalismCommunismIronyGermanyLos AngelesIndividualismSouth AfricaCold WarSoviet UnionTotalitarianismCritical ThinkingOrthodoxyBerlinSelf PityApartheidPostmodernismLiterary CriticismSectarianismTribalismPopulismEuphemismHedonismMonotheismGeorge OrwellMunichGroupthinkSolipsismPolytheismThomas MannPotusRonald ReaganRadical PoliticsMargaret ThatcherRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsApoliticismGeorge Hw BushBought PriesthoodXhosa PeopleZulu PeopleCape ColouredsEurocentricismGerman PeoplePersonality Politics
Book:For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
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“No matter what your deconstructionist professors told you, there is such a thing as human nature. People know how people are. Human nature dictates that most of us will tend to follow the same steps and missteps when solving a large problem. Therefore, stories will feel more natural if heroes tend to follow those same steps and missteps.”

PeopleStoriesProblemHuman NaturePostmodernismSolving Problems
Book:The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers
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“Our physical world seems ready and able to accommodate the needs of the spiritually awakened new Superhuman. The constraints or demands of our material world are not the real problem; it is our own spiritual awareness and philosophical wisdom that is lagging behind.”

WisdomAwarenessPhilosophicalNew WorldNew AgeAwakenedNew ThoughtModern SocietySpiritual DevelopmentPostmodernismSuperhumanSpiritual AwarenessFuture GenerationsConscious EvolutionGlobal Awareness
Book:Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny
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“So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and double for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.”

PhilosophyTruePostmodernism
Book:V.
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“So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Faust's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.”

PhilosophyTruePostmodernism
Book:V.
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“So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind (poets) are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.”

PhilosophyTruePostmodernism
Book:V.
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“In the sense, that is, that the author who created us alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put us into a work of art. And this was a real crime, sir; because he who has had the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. He cannot die. The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die. And to live for ever, it does not need to have extraordinary gifts or to be able to work wonders.”

LifePhilosophyPlayCharacterDeathInventionAbsurdAuthorWriterPostmodernism
Book:Six Characters in Search of an Author
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“And why not—whatever despair we may feel concerning resurrection and reassemblage—find comic relief in the human determination to assert wholeness in the face of inevitable decay and fragmentation?”

ChristianityRedemptionCatholicismResurrectionPostmodernismFragmentationComedy AbsurdMedieval HistoryMedievalismNew Historicism
Book:Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
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“Používám tvoje jméno, Nino, a přidávám k němu jiná jména, podstatná a nepodstatná, přídavná, vlastní a nevlastní, místní a nemístná, a dělám to, abys měla barvu ve tvářích a jas v očích, v každé kapitole tě nalíčím před zrcadlem obrazovky, upravím tě, abys mohla do světa, a potom pro tebe v šatní skříni jazyka vyberu slovesa, která budou nejlépe vyhovovat tvému temperamentu a tvým způsobům. Jsi moje postava, a tak se o tebe starám. Jsi moje figurína, moje loutka, můj maňásek, moje nafukovací panna, která toho sama se sebou má společného tolik — neříkám, zda tak málo, nebo tak moc —, kolik má milostný román, když se to tak vezme, společného s láskou.”

LoveWritingNovelPostmodernism
Book:Možnosti milostného románu
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“The question of the relation between modernity and postmodernity revolves around the issue of 'legitimation.' Modernity, then, appeals to science to legitimate its claim - and by 'science' we simply mean the notion of a universal, autonomous reason. Science, then, is opposed to narrative, which attempts not to prove its claims but rather to proclaim them within a story.”

ReasonTruthScienceNarrativeModernityPostmodernismLegitimation
Book:Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church
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“Yes. That’s right. Don’t be so judgy. I am politely interacting with the hermeneutics-of-suspicion minds of the Carcosa dwellers, embedding the superstructure of the blatherings with base corruptions, presenting forms concealing reality, floottering reflexes and echoes of other determining forces that do fundamental work in manifesting any real social change. And the susceptible dwellers are always down for discussion, which I appreciate to no end. And the ideology of the nineteenth coming from minds like Nietzsche, Comte, Kant, Marx, and Hegel was analyzed in the twentieth century by minds like James, Freud, and Jung, and then that analysis of nineteenth century ideology was itself critiqued in the twenty-first century, the age of hyperprofilicity, and that critique of the analysis of nineteenth century ideology metamorphosed into a new type of cluster of ideologies and then into a steadfast adherence of the pseudoscientific theory of the critique of the analysis.”

PsychologyIdeologyPostmodernismChase GriffinMedia Theory
Book:Schlemiel Gaucho: An Improv Comedy Magick Grimoire
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“Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game.”

TruthScienceKnowledgeThoughtPostmodernismScientismNarrativesLanguage GameMetanarratives
Book:The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
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