Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

Do this: hate him for me after I die. I beg you. Dying request.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers.

There is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.