Pop Culture Quotes

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon.

~ Rachel Cohn

Our best moral stories don’t tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We’re not supposed to have it handed to us.

~ Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It's the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your mouth.

~ Mike Carey

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward. Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves.

~ Ellen Datlow

Describing current human mindsets reflecting our ignorance and cowardice and non action-oriented mentality:I'm going to do nothing but escapist drugs and hop from one party or festival to another. I will dance my way out of the harsh realities of Planet Earth.

~ Mark Passio

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.

~ Adam Rex

A few years ago I started an online flirtation with a high school flame, Andy. Things got weird and I called it off and two months later...Versace was dead...dead.

~ Ryan Murphy

Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.

~ Bell Hooks

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.

~ Chuck Klosterman

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.

~ John Green

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.

~ Jason Najum

Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.

~ Jason Najum

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.

~ Jason Najum

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to

~ Jason Najum

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds--the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking about books, for obsessing over pop culture, but mostly for laughing, talking, and simply being together. There was nothing one could say that the other would find too cruel or too kind. And on those rare occasions when they did tire of each other, they needed only go a day without talking before they yearned to reconnect.

~ Galt Niederhoffer

Human Millipede 6 was the highest-grossing movie of the summer and returned Nicholas Cage to Oscar-winning status.

~ C.z. Hazard

Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?The doctor stared a

~ Peter Clines

Alice is fictional. This isn't.

~ Jess C. Scott

He was a boom boom shake the room kind of guy

~ Saira Viola

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit I don't really mean what I say. So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: How very banal to ask what I mean. Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic.

~ David Foster Wallace

I learned that it's okay to feel the way I do: that my life has no meaning unless I have a boyfriend. A real man is like the perfect vampire-boy and all the perfect guys in Twue Wuv.

~ Jess C. Scott

Because his [Damien Hirst] art is idea art - art drawn on the back of cigarette packets and beer mats, roughed out in airport departure lounges and the back of the taxis, usually delegated to and carried by others - this leaves Damien a lot of time for what might loosely be called socializing. Hanging around.

~ Gordon Burn

Apocalyptic saucer cults have started to spring up all over America. One small group, which has been receiving messages from outer space via Lake City housewife Mrs. Marian Keech, becomes the subject of a research team led by psychologist Leon Festinger. According to an alien entity named Sananda, the end of the world is due any day and under the most cataclysmic of circumstances. The group meets regularly to discuss the latest predictions from Sananda and the rest of the Space Brothers, all relayed to them by Mrs. Keech. Some members bake cakes in the shape of flying saucers to be consumed during their gatherings while local college football scores are closely debated.

~ Ken Hollings

Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.

~ Ken Hollings

Television hols up a mirror to the true nature of family life today. For the first time people see themselves reflected and refracted within its curved glass screen: helping them to define who the are and how they should behave. The introduction of the TV dinner and the TV tray means that families can now watch themselves while they eat. Behavior patterns start to undergo a radical alteration even as they are being affirmed, a rescheduling of life in the suburban living room has taken place.

~ Ken Hollings

Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy.

~ Ken Hollings

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal.

~ Ken Hollings

The public's abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, 'may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.

~ Ken Hollings

Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught between the hardware of scientific detail and the extreme fantasies of contact.

~ Ken Hollings

If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it.

~ Ken Hollings

We will never understand our world until we have come to terms with its future: it is the age in which we live. The Cold War depended upon internal division in order to maintain itself. Behind its various feints, games and strategies lay a perception of behavior as a form of enforced conformity. People would only do what they were prompted to do. This was the thinking that held the lonely crowd together, briefly connecting the forward thrust of material progress with the broader evolutionary curve.

~ Ken Hollings

These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance. Brought up on space heroes and super beings, as revealed to them in comic books and TV shows, the whole galaxy was their birthright, just as Mad magazine and cheap B-movies had shown them hows stupid and flimsy a construct daily life could be. To the subtle dismay of their parents, this was a generation capable of thinking the unthinkable as a matter of course. That their grand cosmological adventure should come to an end just as Neil Armstrong succeeded in bringing Suburbia to the Moon is another story and it will have to wait for another time.

~ Ken Hollings

People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

~ Jess C. Scott

The mythology warped and twisted back along itself until Buffy Summers, the girl who once railed against the unfairness of being Chosen, looked at a squadron of girls who were just like she'd been and took away their right to Choose.

~ Seanan Mcguire

It’s been four years since Justin kissed his best friend Lucas when they were both just 12. Then Justin, afraid of what it meant, afraid of how he felt, afraid of what it made him, ran and has been running from and avoiding Lucas for these four years. The thing about running is that no matter how fast you run, the past always catches up with you, and when faced with his past and all the things he’s missed, Justin finds he doesn’t want to run anymore. Now Justin wants to try to make things right with Lucas; he wants his best friend back. But maybe it's too late. Maybe Lucas has moved on. Read the story to find out if Justin is successful. This story isn't only about internalized homophobia and the hurtful things it leads gay kids to do to themselves and others. It is much more about truth, love and hurt and coming to terms with those things, forgiving yourself, and loving yourself enough to hold yourself accountable.

~ Juvenalius

It’s tough enough to be a straight boy in a small town high school looking for the love of your life. But at least your possible loves are all out in the open.

~ Juvenalius

Juvenalius, 15 and gay, has been raised in a difficult family and has been held in his aunt's Diana suffocating iron grip for all of his life. He has been made to feel worthless and ashamed; with no freedom, only obedience. Yet this begins to change one day when he meets a boy named Davis at his high school who has drawn the meaningful letter 'C' on his right hand. Now Juvenalius has hope but his behavioral changes are seen as an act of defiance in his aunt's eyes until she catches Juvenalius and Davis kissing out back under the school's library windows. Then Juve's life is unexpectedly transformed.

~ Juvenalius

I was on my way to talk to Davis when the car hit me. . . . . . A dark figure emerged from the shadows, half-lit by the glittering streetlight and the pale glow of the moon. . . . . . . Huge black wings erupted out of her back like a blooming rose. She was beautiful. . . . . I knew who this woman was.’Are you Death?' . . . . . “'Most people have something holding them down to this world,' she said, 'like a tether on a balloon. It could be something material, a person, or persons, an unfinished goal. There are many reasons to want to keep living. I wonder, Juvenalius, what is yours?'I smiled just thinking about it. 'His name’s Davis.'Her hand stroked my cheek so gently I wanted to cry. 'Tell me about him,' she whispered.And Juvenalius does. And you will be transfixed as Juve's first friend comes to life in his memory in this Tale with a gay twist.

~ Juvenalius

Juvenalius has problems... though like most kids on the threshold of sexual awareness he only knows life sucks... he isn't clear about why. His mother rants on and on about the iniquity of his school having a gay straight alliance. She's quite safe about that, as Ryan is too shy to join, or is that scared? His only friend is a dog so the question of boy or girl-friend hardly arises... until he gets a valentine... from the least likely boy in the school.

~ Juvenalius

Church is so confusing for Juvenalius. His new pastor preaches nothing but hate and condemnation of gays and lesbians, but no matter how carefully he reads his Bible, he can’t find where it says God hates him. Will things change when Juve's boyfriend Devis suggests that they all go to his church instead?

~ Juvenalius