#shallow

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#isolation #loneliness #modern-society #noise #peace

Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells. ↗

— Mark Vonnegut

#fake #fear #people #shallow #beauty

I was tired of pretending that I was someone else just to get along with people, just for the sake of having friendships. ↗

— Kurt Cobain

#facade #friendship #genuine #kurt-cobain #shallow

If you don’t find the right set of eyes to see through your bull, you will always be surrounded by friends that will tell you white lies because they like your company and don’t want to ruin the evening. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#bluntness #fake-friends #friendship #girlfriends #honest-friends

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade. ↗

— Joan Didion

#after #anyway #before #begun #berkeley

Deep breaths are very helpful at shallow parties. ↗

— Barbara Walters

#breaths #deep #helpful #parties #shallow

I think, on the whole, men are much more shallow than women. ↗

— Sharon Gless

#i think #men #more #much #shallow

Shallows where a lamb could wade and depths where an elephant would drown. ↗

— Matthew Henry

#depths #drown #elephant #lamb #shallows

Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work. ↗

— Colin Wilson

#because #been #cheerful #creep #errors

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials. ↗

— Neil Postman

#conversation #people #shallowness #talking #television