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Quotes of the day: David Carr
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Published Thursday, September 08, 2016 @ 12:20 AM EDT
Sep 08 2016

David Michael Carr (September 8, 1956 - February 12, 2015) was an American writer, columnist, and author. He wrote the Media Equation column and covered culture for The New York Times. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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Civilians are equally bewildering to the addict. I've watched people drink a glass and a half of wine and push away the rest. What exactly is the point of that?

Drugs, it seems to me, do not conjure demons; they reveal them.

End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.

I became a single parent at a time when nobody would trust me with a ficus plant. Other than that, I've been sort of a model citizen.

I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end soon.

If you dumped every reporter who ever sent a snide message or talked smack in private, there would be nothing but crickets chirping in newsrooms all over America.

if your head is in your phone, the scenery never changes.

It's more important that you fit in before you stick out.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.

Necessity is a mother.

Regardless of how much blather you hear about the two parties bickering in Washington, the Beltway is really a monoculture that accommodates the two poles of a debate but very little in between.

Some of the burdens we carry include false weight, perhaps to make up for all the horrible stuff we actually did and forgot.

The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, 'Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal- Mart.'

The web is kind of a self-cleaning oven and what you have up there can grow more accurate as time goes by. That's never true of print. It's always there for the ages.

There is something terribly existential in all of this: Work all of your life to scratch out a piece of suburban idyll, and then work some more so you can afford to get the hell away from it.

To be an addict is to be something of a cognitive acrobat. You spread versions of yourself around, giving each person the truth he or she needs- you need, actually- to keep them at a remove.

Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history- the facts of what happened is both immutable and mostly unknowable.

We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.

When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception.

When people fear for their futures, they like to gather in a dark room and stare at a screen, holding hands against the gloom.

Who you are and what you have been through should give you a prism on life that belongs to you only.

You can have the best search function in the world, but if it is crawling across a cesspool, it is not going to bring back much of anything interesting.

Keep in mind that when public figures get in trouble for something they said, it is usually not because they misspoke, but because they accidentally told the truth.

Facebook is a bit like that big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you.

Keep typing until it turns into writing.


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