Best 104 quotes in «pop culture quotes» category

If a PLL fan has had enough drama then you KNOW it’s been enough drama.

I feel weird and not at all like myself, like Stefan Salvatore when he gets the taste for human blood after 150 years.

If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it.

I have a transgressive spirit, and Pop is transgression's best friend.

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon.

In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you

In America, they have this thing called a story cycle. When they're at war, they start doing fantasy and war-style entertainment. When fantasy gets big, they go through a recession, and horror starts gaining popularity. When horror gets popular, mystery starts gaining popularity. Then when mystery reaches its peak, science fiction starts gaining popularity. Then things get rough again, and we go back to Fantasy". This quote was taken from an interview from The Myth of Cthulhu: Dark Navigation.

In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.

In keeping with your policy of bringing Pollution the latest in death and violence, and in living colour, there’s going to be something entirely different… death without remediation.

In other news, Aang dominates on “Are You Smarter Than the Fire Nation”. Bella Swan becomes engaged to her boyfriend of one year, Edward Cullen, and unceremoniously sends Jacob Black to the “friend zone”. Pop star Candy Cane trades her controversial career for being a housewife (which was a move that is very unpopular with many of her young fans), and Jacquel Rassenworth is still the Internet’s biggest fame-nut (cue APPLAUSE).

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would seel her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker.

In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children.

I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: "Fuck me he's a earthbender.

The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

It's basically a joke." "I think it's cool," Julian says. "It's all about control, right?" He considers something. "It's not a joke. You should take it seriously. I mean, you're also one of the producers--" I cut him off. "Why have you been tracking this?" "It's a big deal and--" "Julian, it's a movie," I say. "Why have you been tracking this? It's just another movie." "Maybe for you." "What does that mean?" "Maybe for others it's something else," Julian says. "Something more meaningful." "I get where you're coming from, but there's a vampire in it.

It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

It’s true, I guess, that no matter how much it sucks, you’re supposed to sacrifice things for a friend. It was a concept that he hadn’t understood earlier on in his life. In elementary school, Bernie had been assigned 'Charlotte’s Web' to read, and he’d always found it selfish how Charlotte the spider gave everything she had to Wilbur the pig, all her time and energy trying to keep this pig alive and off the farmer’s dinner plate, only to end up dying in the wispy remains of her last cobweb. "That pig was a selfish bastard who whined too much." He hadn’t understood why, in his college days watching 'The Smurfs' cartoon on TV just to pass the time, the evil wizard Gargamel had kept his bratty little apprentice, Scruple, around with him even when there was no incentive to do it and it would have been more convenient to just get rid of him. "Well, you give and you give and you give, you sacrifice things for somebody even when you normally wouldn’t, but you get back something worth having, maybe. Something worth all that sacrifice… I mean, what’s life worth if you have nobody to share it with, anyway?

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward. Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves.

I want my rockstars dead.

Key element of television programming, the characters must watch the programming themselves.

Lucas shook his head. "We haven't caught him yet. We're still looking." "Every ship but your four fastest," I murmured to myself.

Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?" "I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?" The doctor stared at him. "I'm never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?

Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.

Okay, the question is, 'What enormously popular novel by William Peter Blatty, set in the posh Washington D.C. suburb of Georgetown, concerned the demonic possesion of a young girl?' '' ''Johnny Cash'', Henry replied. ''Jesus Christ!'' Tricks Postino yelled. ''That's what you say to everythin! Johnny Cash, that's what you say to fuckin everythin!'' ''Johnny Cash is everything,'' Heny replied gravely...

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.

Pop culture is just a rubik's cube of shit stacked on shit. And it's always turning and you can't figure it out. Ever. Unless you're a tiny Asian boy who can do it SO quickly! Where did this metaphore go? In Kim Kardashian's butt!

Our best moral stories don’t tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We’re not supposed to have it handed to us.

Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists...Essentially the serious novelist should do what s/he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.

Pop is about speaking everybody's language. The imagery and iconography we instantly recognize. When you can rely on things that the public already knows, you're dealing with Pop.

popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

Seinfeld was typically American in that show. He was a pretty funny guy, but he had no sense of style. Tacky like a Texan tux. Tasteless dressing and tasteful jokes. That's Seinfeld for me. I would have preferred it the other way around.

Ready for a selfie, m'lady?

Reported sightings of UFOs are tailing off. With public interest declining and subscriptions dwindling, NICAP and APRO start to compete with each other over membership. The open-minded middle ground is stretched to breaking point, caught between the hardware of scientific detail and the extreme fantasies of contact.

Rocket Fever Grips Nation's Teenagers' cheers on enthusiastic newsreel, reflecting the nation's sudden reversal in attitude following the successful launch of Explorer-I into Earth orbit. Rather than being strange and threatening, outer space looks set to become the next big distraction after Elvis Presley and Davy Crockett hats. 'More and more teenagers are passing up rock and roll for a rocket role,' commentator Michael Fitzmaurice blithely remarks before very probably wishing he hadn't.

Selalunya orang muda membuat keputusan yang tergesa-gesa. Mereka tidak berfikir panjang. Mereka suka membuat keputusan secara pop. Semuanya mahu membentuk pop. Mereka mahu lagu pop. Mereka mahu kahwin pop. Mereka mahu pakaian pop. Mereka bernyanyi lagu pop. Mereka makan kuih pop. Mereka bercerai pun cara pop.

Imagine: If shifting from one universe to another is like moving up or down to parallel layers, overlapping with one universe, then going to another timeline is like taking a jump to the left.' 'Or a step to the right,' Jena said wryly.

Seriously, he was worse than Captain Kirk. Luke hardly ever had a shirt on.

Selbst die Verwandten der Berühmten [sind] berühmt, denn Ruhm [ist] erblich.

She would have killed for anything with Julius the Monkey on it.

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it

Sometimes, it seems like popular media exists primarily to set impossible standards and then to shame people who don't try their hardest to meet them.

songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

Television hols up a mirror to the true nature of family life today. For the first time people see themselves reflected and refracted within its curved glass screen: helping them to define who the are and how they should behave. The introduction of the TV dinner and the TV tray means that families can now watch themselves while they eat. Behavior patterns start to undergo a radical alteration even as they are being affirmed; a rescheduling of life in the suburban living room has taken place.

The moment we see a pop artifact offering even a sliver of something different—say, a woman who isn’t a size zero or who doesn't treat a man as the center of the universe—we cling to it desperately because that representation is all we have.

The mythology warped and twisted back along itself until Buffy Summers, the girl who once railed against the unfairness of being Chosen, looked at a squadron of girls who were just like she'd been and took away their right to Choose.

The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball + Bollywood and underlined it twice.

The public's abiding fascination with flaying saucers, C.G. Jung suggests, 'may be a spontaneous reaction of the subconscious to fear of the apparently insoluble political situation in the world that may lead at any moment to catastrophe. At such times eyes turn heavenwards in search of help, and miraculous forebodings of a threatening or consoling nature appear from on high.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.