Virginia Heffernan Quotes & Sayings

If it's ever fair to say that anything has "changed everything," it's fair to say so about the Internet. — Virginia Heffernan

As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning "computers." In fact, I was learning culture. — Virginia Heffernan

Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They're epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity. — Virginia Heffernan

Unless you are rich, and can con vales center in a sanatorium estate (where visitors came down a tiered, oceanside lawn to found you ato your easel) you have to keep going when you're depressed. That means phone calls, appointments errands, holidays, family, friends, and colleagues. — Virginia Heffernan

As any American with children knows, our children have at least one bright, clear reason for being: to furnish subjects for digital photographs that can be corrected, cropped, captioned, organized, categorized, albumized, broadcast, turned into screen savers, and brandished on online social networks. — Virginia Heffernan

The turn away from the BlackBerry and toward the iPhone is a reckoning with our essential nature and how we currently process, deploy, and enjoy symbolic communication. — Virginia Heffernan

I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out. — Virginia Heffernan

I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language. — Virginia Heffernan

Cruise through the gargantuan sites - YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo! - and it's as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web's aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America. — Virginia Heffernan

We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents. — Virginia Heffernan

Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because — Virginia Heffernan

Over the past two decades screens have proliferated, filling our purses, pockets, and bedside tables. The living room is no longer configured around a single blazing digital fireplace, the television; instead it flashes with decentralized brushfires: ereaders, tablets, laptops, desktops, smartphones, televisions, refrigerator screens. As for the radios and bookshelves that were supposed to vanish with the digitalization of the American home, they've stubbornly remained. — Virginia Heffernan

If beauty is only skin deep, look really, really hard. — Virginia Heffernan