Top 60 Tao Lin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Patriotism is the belief that not all human lives are worth the same.”

— Tao Lin

2. “The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

— Tao Lin

3. “I just keep investing in the future, and I haven’t reached the point where I’m not doing that.”

— Tao Lin

4. “I can feel the universe expanding and making things be further apart.”

— Tao Lin

5. “Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true – life wasn’t supposed to be incredible, after all. Life wasn’t some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once. There were good ones, bad ones, some went straight to video.”

— Tao Lin

6. “Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or “otherworld,” outside, or in equal contrast with, his increasingly familiar and self-consciously repetitive life in America, where it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing.”

— Tao Lin

7. “I think mostly the commodifying comes after I’ve done something that has some other value to me.”

— Tao Lin

8. “I cried when my ex-girlfriend sent me a text message saying how much she liked my present to her.”

— Tao Lin

9. “The correct arrangement of words will make these bad feelings go away tonight.”

— Tao Lin

10. “While other rich people might be like, “Once I’m rich I’m going to go on a vacation to wherever,” but instead they just keep wanting to be more rich. It just seems like it would be fun to do whatever you wanted. If I were really rich I would be flying places, I think.”

— Tao Lin

11. “Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake.”

— Tao Lin

12. “There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.”

— Tao Lin

13. “Sorry, I’d love to hang out with you but this alcohol isn’t going to drink itself into incoherence and liver failure.”

— Tao Lin

14. “Matt would stare at Andrew for 10 minutes. It’s depressing that people are different. Everyone should be one person, who should then kill itself in hand-to-hand combat.”

— Tao Lin

15. “As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls.”

— Tao Lin

16. “Everyone is folding boxes. Andrew is folding boxes. If the entire job were to fold boxes people would scream. They would fold, and sometimes scream, existentially, then be dragged into a field and beaten into a paste. Sometimes there would be a killing rampage.”

— Tao Lin

17. “Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity, but because of accidentally doing it.”

— Tao Lin

18. “You were one person alive and your brain was encased in a skull. There were other people out there. It took effort to be connected.”

— Tao Lin

19. “On average, since the urge to kill myself isn’t so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.”

— Tao Lin

20. “I don’t know how to incorporate regret. But I’ll say, like, “It affected me that way,” “I learned this,” “Next time maybe I’ll do it differently.””

— Tao Lin

21. “I just don’t feel good if I’m repeating myself.”

— Tao Lin

22. “I think Gmail chats are different than IRL conversations because Gmail chats are saved by Gmail exactly as they occurred. I like texts and emails. Seems like I don’t have anything to say that isn’t obvious about texts, emails, and Gmail chats.”

— Tao Lin

23. “It seems like most people will agree that they would like if they were treated by other people based on what they have concretely done in their life, not what other people have done, with their lives.”

— Tao Lin

24. “I was delivering pizzas at Domino’s. I was 17 maybe. I liked it a lot. Just driving in the nice weather and listening to music.”

— Tao Lin

25. “I want my funeral to be a pizza party with 500 pizzas and nobody is allowed to leave until all the pizzas are eaten.”

— Tao Lin

26. “If a context and a goal is defined I could say if it’s good or bad. But overall I don’t view things as good or bad. So I’m like a robot or computer in that sense. So maybe that’s why people don’t think they know me when they read my writing.”

— Tao Lin

27. “Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn’t be moose there and the moose would fall.”

— Tao Lin

28. “Nature isn’t mute,” he thought in distracted review. Something mute wouldn’t unfurl a universe in which to evolve singularityward. Something mute wouldn’t speak people from atoms.”

— Tao Lin

29. “At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead.”

— Tao Lin

30. “It sometimes seemed to him that for love to work, it had to be fair, that he should tell only half the joke, and she the other half. Otherwise, it would not be love, but something completely else–pity or entertainment, or stand-up comedy.”

— Tao Lin

31. “I’d like to disappear one day... I get the feeling sometimes that I can do that. It’s like there’s some place I really want to go to, and I’m not sure where, but I can still go. I think I’d really like that. I’d sit down one afternoon. I’d say, “Okay now, Susan, time to go.” Clasp my hands or something. Then I’d do it. I’d just be gone then. No one would know. I wouldn’t even know.”

— Tao Lin

32. “Amoeba ass is so hot.”

— Tao Lin

33. “The distracting feeling of disbelief when you’re finally doing something you’ve procrastinated on for notable amounts of time.”

— Tao Lin

34. “Sam looked at the sky to see if there were a lot of stars. There seemed to be a normal amount of stars.”

— Tao Lin

35. “He wished his mom had stayed in Taiwan. Raised him here, native. He wished his mom had died early, leaving him to do things for himself. Neil wished for 10 percent increases in kindness, tolerance, social skills, confidence and attractiveness and then felt cheated in life by 10 percent.”

— Tao Lin

36. “I like reading books where people with a lot of money use it to do whatever they want. Like stay in expensive hotels and do whatever drugs they want and fly wherever they want.”

— Tao Lin

37. “The unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone else would be a screen, distributed throughout the city, onto which he’d project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination. Because he’d appear to, and be able to pretend he was, but never actually be a part of the mass, maybe he’d gradually begin to feel a kind of needless intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and feeling affection without touching or speaking.”

— Tao Lin

38. “If I don’t like someone and I start reading their stuff, it seems like my brain will just automatically start criticizing everything that’s there. It’s really hard to read a book without having all this outside information telling you what to think about it.”

— Tao Lin

39. “I don’t know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I’ve read maybe one page of one of his books and didn’t think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.”

— Tao Lin

40. “Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon.”

— Tao Lin

41. “Haley Joel Osment said “Party girl” which was a term they had for people who did not speak in a quiet monotone and were not severely detached.”

— Tao Lin

42. “A world without right or wrong was a world that did not want itself, anything other than itself, or anything not those two things, but that still wanted something. A world without right or wrong invited you over, complained about you, and gave you cookies. Don’t leave, it said, and gave you a vegan cookie. It avoided eye contact, but touched your knee sometimes. It was the world without right or wrong. It didn’t have any meaning. It just wanted a little meaning.”

— Tao Lin

43. “I think Bret Easton Ellis has said that he doesn’t completely identify with his characters. And I think he has referred to them as immoral before.”

— Tao Lin

44. “Thousands of years from now they will use my fossil remains as an example of a mistake in the evolutionary process.”

— Tao Lin

45. “The gate has a secret passcode. Sara has a secret passcode. She should. Andrew would stand there for years trying combinations. He wouldn’t keep track or develop a strategy but just continue trying different combinations and then Kafka would rise from the grave and write a novel about him.”

— Tao Lin

46. “I don’t like happy people,” Andrew said. “They’re already happy; they don’t need to be liked.” “Wow, so selfless,” Mark said. “You’re a saint. I commend your selflessness. Amazing.”

— Tao Lin

47. “I don’t actually enjoy parties or relationships, I just like the idea that I could maybe be in either of those things.”

— Tao Lin

48. “She felt strange. For a moment it seemed to her that the day was already over – she was in bed, asleep, and then it was the next day and now here she was again. ‘Oh,’ she said.”

— Tao Lin

49. “But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really. It just went away after a while.”

— Tao Lin

50. “Life has never died, which is something that I think people ignore.”

— Tao Lin