Modern Lovers Quotes

When I was 14 years old, I was a huge fan of the Velvets, the Stooges and the Modern Lovers. They are my three favourite bands. I never get sick of 'em. ~ Evan Dando

Reiko set the ball on the ground and patted my knee. "Look," she said, "I'm not telling you to stop sleeping with girls. If you're O.K. with that, then it's OK. It's your life after all, it's something you have to decide. All I'm saying is that you shouldn't use yourself up in some unnatural form. Do you see what I'm getting at? It would be such a waste. The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older. It's true. So think carefully. If you want to take care of Naoko, take care of yourself too."
I said I would think about it. ~ Haruki Murakami

I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, 'The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, 'Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste,' and I didn't want to waste mine. ~ Rob Sheffield

-Do you want me to leave?
-Yes
-Do you want me to stay?
-Yes
-Do you love me?
-Yes
-Do you want me?
-No
-Then leave me
-I can't
-Then stay with me
-I can't, I can't, I can't
*Equation of a fucked up relationship ~ Malak El Halabi

I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk. ~ Dean Wareham

When you are in love, you always want to be with your lover. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In novels, women run off with their lovers. In real life, women stay. ~ Kim Wright

The modern scene in decoration is not a unified or controlled one. The unified control of the arts during the reign of Louis XIV no longer exists; today the designer is free to achieve a wider variety and more personal approach to the interior. ~ Van Day Truex

The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish ... ~ Herbert Read

Nothing is difficult in the eyes of a lover. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Modern man wants everything to fit within his own perspective and resents being awakened from his blissful stupor. This is why he mocks, slanders, distorts, attacks, rejects, and hates whatever lies beyond his own worldview. He does not want to think, because television has taught him to hate thinking. He does not want to ask himself questions, because it is too tiring to do so. He doesn't want to struggle to go beneath life's superficiality, because modern culture has made him comfortable as he lives the pampered life of a hungry consumer in a cage of materialism. In ~ Dionysios Farasiotis

They reciprocated the great and saving lie
that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things
willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I collaborated with fellow cat lover and designer Geren Ford to create a sweater that we hope any cat parent would wear to show their kitty pride and that all animal lovers can wear in support of the ASPCA. ~ Kellie Pickler

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects. ~ Le Corbusier

Fire causes burning, lightning causes thunder, winds cause waves, and gravity causes bodies to fall. Such connections between an effect and its cause form the cornerstone of scientific thinking, both modern and classical. But this notion of causality is one which is specifically rejected by Asharite doctrine, and the most articulate and effective opponent of physical causality was AI-Ghazzali ~ Pervez Hoodbhoy

[T]he true natural sciences lock together in theory and evidence to form the ineradicable technical base of modern civilization. The pseudosciences satisfy personal psychological needs ... but lack the ideas or the means to contribute to the technical base. ~ E. O. Wilson

The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life. ~ Jon Meacham

The world always said to just be yourself, but it turned out when Evelyn was herself, no guys were at all interested, so she was left with games of make-believe, expressing enthusiasm for whatever the men wanted to do, be it rock climbing or going to a cheese-beer pairing or a Knicks game. ~ Stephanie Clifford

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system ~ Giorgio Agamben

The struggle to make an absolute statement in an individually conceived vocabulary accounts for the profound tensions inherent in the best modern work. ~ Harold Rosenberg

You can rescue someone from danger, but not from change and death; the soldier who survives the battle becomes someone else, something else, somewhere else. His war subsides; his memory fades; his nation ceases to exist; all but the elemental structures decay away; the very atoms that were once warring sides are now soil, trees, lovers, birds; all the medals are playthings for strangers; the cannons have been melted down and turned back into church bells that will become cannons again for another war. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Lovers re-create the world. ~ Carter Heyward

You must have some new inventions that we did not have in my time. Tell me about your most modern things."
"I think the best things are the bicycle trails. Since 1997 they've allowed no new roads to be built - only bike trails - and now there are as many miles of bike trails as there are of roads for cars."
"So you can really bike all over the country?" you ask.
"Sure - and not alongside buses and trucks and crazy drivers, but through forests and across plains and deserts and along rivers and streams. I sometimes feel like biking forever that way, and there are hostels for bikers where you can sleep in comfort for almost nothing. Most of the
cost is paid for by taxes on gasoline. ~ Edward Packard

What we do in life is determined by how we communicate to ourselves. In the modern world, the quality of life is the quality of communication. ~ Tony Robbins

Music is a gut thing. You're working in a medium which is more in touch with the primal than the modern. A gig is a ritual. There's a congregation. ~ Siobhan Fahey

The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe's Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain ...
I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust's error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done. ~ Robert Aickman

These weren't cheap modern books; these were books bound in leather, and not just leather, but leather from clever cows who had given their lives for literature after a happy existence in the very best pastures. ~ Terry Pratchett

He looked at her in surprise as she pushed him back, her hand on his chest. Prurient and tender and shy and slutty, she tasted him, and savored the mouthfeel of him, and it was as if they had been lovers since forever. There was never a thought of Sparrow School, or numbered techniques. Dominika simply wanted him. ~ Jason Matthews

Life breathed spring (haiku)
spring awakening
dance of lovers
delicately wrapped in cherry blossoms ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice. ~ Elias Canetti

It is not clear who will bring to the Whitehouse those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history and most important - a sense of humour, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes. He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humourless, particularly in dealing with Congress. ( ... ) Kennedy had a detached and even donnish willingness to grant a merit in the other fellow's argument. Johnson is not so inclined to retreat and grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new administration but it works. The lovers of style are not too happy with the new administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining. ~ Robert A. Caro

For this equality belongs to the post-Renaissance world of ideology-of political magic and the alchemical science" of politics. Envy is the basis of its broad appeal. And rampant envy, the besetting virus of modern society, is the most predictable result of insistence upon its realization. Furthermore, hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition. Under its pressure self respect gives way in the large majority of men who have not reached the level of their expectation, who have no support from an inclusive identity, and who hunger for "revenge" on those who occupy a higher station and will (they expect) continue to enjoy that advantage. The end result is visible in the spiritual proletarians of the "lonely crowd." Bertrand de Jouvenel has described the process which produces such non-persons in his memorable study, On Power. They are the natural pawns of an impersonal and omnicompetent Leviathan. And to insure their docility such a state is certain to recruit a large "new class" of men, persons superior in "ability" and authority, both to their ostensible "masters" among the people and to such anachronisms as stand in their progressive way. Such is the evidence of the recent past and particularly of American history. Arrant individualism, fracturing and then destroying the hope of amity and confederation, the communal bond and the ancient vision of the good society as an extrapolation from family, is ~ M.E. Bradford

I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. ~ Laura Esquivel

Lovers feel a certain burning in their hearts. A deep longing and desire to meet with the beloved creates that burning. To love God is bound to create a very great fire in you. You will be on fire because you have chosen as your love object something impossible. You will have to weep and cry, and you will have to pray, and you will have to fast, and your mind has to continuously repeat and remember the beloved. ~ Osho

Being busy is a distraction and I am sure that doing nothing, resting and sleeping are all good cures for modern life. I am not suggesting we all do nothing but sleep, however, sometimes stopping long enough to 'be' can be very powerful. ~ Joanna Runciman

He reached up and cupped her face in his hands. "Did it ever occur to you that I don't want to share you with anyone else? That maybe now that I've realized how much you mean to me, I want to show you as much as I can? Or maybe, because you're so damn sexy and my every freaking fantasy that I can't wait to get you alone, so I can touch you, kiss you, and love you from head to toe? ~ Samantha Chase

She drove into the inner bailey and saw the sight she had tried to envision on the way here. But nothing had prepared her for this. Hot, hot, hot men in kilts with oiled abs, pecs, and bare legs, and wearing leather boots -- some ancient, others more modern. The men were absolutely drool worthy! The only thing she regretted was that she hadn't been given the opportunity to oil them down. ~ Terry Spear

[on Rouge] This is a film about communication that disappears. We have better and better tools and less and less communication with each other. We only exchange information. ~ Krzysztof Kieslowski

People need to understand the basics of evolution if they are going to reject it - otherwise, they are not contributing anything productive to modern society. ~ Greg Graffin

European nation with highest politician/lover ratio: Few European states can hope to compete with France and Italy in this department, and the two nations have been battling for European political lothario supremacy for over thirty years. The contest has been increasingly acrimonious since 1998, when France was initially the clear winner but somehow "lost" sixty-eight illicit lovers in the recount and had to concede defeat. The following year was no less rocked in scandal, when the Italians were disqualified for "stretching the boundaries" of their elected representatives to include senior civil servants - and the crown was tossed back to France. No one was quite prepared for the disgraceful scandal the following year when it was discovered that one French minister had no mistress at all and "loved his wife," a shocking revelation that led to his resignation and ultimately to the fall of the government. ~ Jasper Fforde