Postmodernist Quotes & Sayings

How I longed to tell her about Harriet
but somehow I could not. The grief in the room belonged to Porcelain and I realized, almost at once, that it would be selfish to rob her of it in any way. — Alan Bradley

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there. — Harry Frankfurt

People think of songwriting as a very personal thing: A guy gets up there with an acoustic guitar and he sings his heart out, bares his soul. — Craig Finn

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies. — Joyce Appleby

Through reproductive technology, postmodernist art dispenses with the aura. The fiction of the creating subject gives way to a frank confiscation, quotation, excerptation, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence ... are undermined. — Douglas Crimp

Is that where it all went wrong? Or is it where it all went right? — Stephen Fry

Children who plan their own schedules and evaluate their own work build up their brains and learn to take more responsibility. — Bruce Feiler

They said I was splitting hairs and losing my objectivity. I reminded them that I was a postmodernist who didn't believe in objectivity. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we'd better do something postmodernist - quickly, before somebody else did. — David Bowie

The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies, and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is no. No squared. The postmodernist belief in the — Michael Shermer

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic. — David Lehman

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles ... Contemporary or postmodernist art ... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. — Fredric Jameson

Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist. — David Foster Wallace

Every time you take someone figuratively by the hand and introduce him or her to Jesus Christ, you will feel how deeply our Savior loves you and loves the person whose hand is in yours. — Clayton Christensen

The idealist hopes. The romantic sees doom. The postmodernist sees doom and hopes. — Bauvard

We live in a world where many kinds of regression dignify themselves with the mantle of progress. — Michael Moorcock

The postmodernist critique of representation undermines the referential status of visual imagery, its claim to represent reality as it really is - either the appearance of things or some ideal order behind or beyond appearance. — Craig Owens

Awareness is always the first step. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

Postmodernism's specifically academic appeal comes from its being another in the sequence of all-purpose "unmasking" strategies that offer a way to criticize the intellectual efforts of others not by engaging with them on the ground, but by diagnosing them from a superior vantage point and charging them with inadequate self-awareness. Logical positivism and Marxism were used by academics in this way, and postmodernist relativism is a natural successor in the role.
[The Sleep of Reason] — Thomas Nagel

Pain doesn't last. And when it's gone, we have something to show for it. Growth. — Kamal Ravikant

We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead. — Maira Kalman

A discussion should be a genuine attempt to explore a subject rather than a battle between competing egos. — Edward De Bono

Finally, the loss of moral authority in the law means we have forfeited the rule oflaw and reverted to arbitrary human rule. The rule of law cannot survive unless there is an unchanging and transcendent standard against which we can measure human laws. Otherwise, the law is whatever the lawmakers or judges say it is-which can only result, eventually, in the collapse of free gov- ernment.43 The postmodernist assault on objective moral truth has put us on the road to tyranny. — Charles W. Colson

My favorite method of encryption is chunking revolutionary documents inside a mess of JPEG or MP3 code and emailing it off as an "image" or a "song." But besides functionality, code also possesses literary value. If we frame that code and read it through the lens of literary criticism, we will find that the past hundred years of modernist and postmodernist writing have demonstrated the artistic value of similar seemingly arbitrary arrangements of letters. — Kenneth Goldsmith

Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glories), Chaos Magick is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the 'authenticity' of the system used. So Chaos Magic then, is not a system - it utilises systems and encourages adherents to devise their own, giving magic a truly Postmodernist flavour. — Phil Hine

He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word postmodernist. — Donna Tartt

The modernist preference for high seriousness is replaced by the postmodernist preference for playfulness. — Dharanidhar Sahu

To the modernist, "myth," like religion, merely signifies a comfortable and entrenched lie. For the postmodernist, myth simply represents one story, one narrative among many; it is purely subjective, certainly signifying nothing of transcendent or any other kind of importance. — Bradley J. Birzer

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist. — Donna Tartt

My work is the embodiment of dreams in one form or another. — William Morris

I take on a philosophical and postmodernist approach to the art-making process, investigating problems on a personal and intuitive level. This process is what fuels my mind and informs me, raises new questions, and gives my work resonance. — Michael Bell

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist? — Kathy Acker

Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,
historicist, materialist, postcolonial, and so on. — Jane Goldman

While much of postmodernist analysis should be credited with theoretical imagination, as well as talent for capturing something of the Zeitgeist, this type of analysis nonetheless misses some crucial facts about consumption: that consumption is vitally linked to production; consumption is anchored in concrete relations; and the driving force in consumption is individual interest, as encouraged and often shaped by profit interests. — Richard Swedberg

A few years back, an American Jewish feminist academic sent me a request for an interview... The professor presented herself as a gender scholar, another postmodernist discipline that fails to inspire my intellect. However, I was curious to see what a person who happens to be academically qualified in being a woman might come up with. — Gilad Atzmon

The fact is: our faith is more rational than the most elaborate paradigm of the atheistic foundationalist, more romantic than the wildest dreams of the unbelieving postmodernist. our faith is a dogma that makes you dance. — Reggie M. Kidd

The path to big, systemic change is collective action. That takes Sister Courage. — Gloria Feldt