We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.
Thom YorkeRead
I tell you what's really ridiculous--going into a bookstore and there's all these books about yourself. In a way, it feels like you're already dead.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the existential discomfort of seeing one's biography or stories in books, evoking feelings of detachment from life.
Thom Yorke's quote captures the peculiar sensation of encountering numerous books about oneself, which can evoke an unsettling realization of one's own mortality and legacy. It hints at the surreal experience of feeling like a spectator to one's life, as if one's experiences and identity are being cataloged while one remains detached from them, leading to a poignant reflection on existence and self-perception.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of autobiographies on the concept of identity.
We weren't listening to guitar bands, we were thoroughly ashamed of being a guitar band. So we bought loads of keyboards and learned how to use them, and when we got bored we went back to guitars.
I'm achingly aware of my own limitations as both part of the human race and as an individual. I'm just, casting this out that, maybe, I'm not so perfect as is the affront I oft put on. After all, the lyric is 'I wish I was special'. I truly just want to be loved and accepted, I think, like all humans.
There's a pervading sense of loneliness I've had since the day I was born. Maybe a lot of other people feel the same way, but I'm not about to run up and down the street asking everybody if they're as lonely as I am. I'd probably get locked up.
People in bands don't have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid.
I don't think young people are as demoralized as the media and government would like us to think. The obvious sign of that is how strong and how close personal connections are and how much people are able to build a life for themselves, despite all this stuff that's been thrown at them.
We're at a time when we are being presented with undeniable changes in the global climate and fundamental issues that affect every single one of us, and it's the time we're listening to the most hokey shite on the radio and watching vacuous bullshit celebrities being vacuous bullshit celebrities and desperately trying to forget about everything. Which is fine, you know, but personally speaking, I can't do that.
That moment - to this ... may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind - there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.
I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.
Were we incapable of empathy β of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own β then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
Jesus has borne the death penalty on our behalf. Behold the wonder! There He hang upon the cross!
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