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.
It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.
The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.
Still falls the rain - dark as the world of man, black as our loss - blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.
He who lives as children live - who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance - remains childlike.
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