Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice - read books.

When you don't know where you're going, you drive on the highway.

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

I’m twenty-four, a first grade teacher, have a Yorkie named Pedro, a goldfish named Fish, have never had sex, or a serious boyfriend, and I’m the town lesbian who pukes when she sees a pussy. Nothing really to be jealous of at all.

Certainly we can say that the pace of modern life, increased and supported by our technology in general and our personal electronics in particular, has resulted in a short attention span and an addiction to the influx of information. A mind so conditioned has little opportunity to think critically, and even less chance to experience life deeply by being in the present moment. A complex life with complicated activities, relationships and commitments implies a reflexive busy-ness that supplants true thinking and feeling with knee-jerk reactions. It is a life high in stress and light on substance, at least in the spiritually meaningful dimensions of being.

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to l

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing sweeter than seeing a friend is that friend canceling on me.

We are just too blinded by the phrase, "grow old together" and learning its meaning from hopeless movies and novels that glorify undying love and unbelievable understanding. Don't you think? Reality is... Love dies. People change. And we grow old together in present. Today, tomorrow, and every day after that.It's not about eternity. It's not till death do us part.It's about today. This day. And I believe only in today.So, come! Let's grow old together today!

Modern life is, for most of us, a kind of serfdom to mortgage, job and the constant assault to consume. Although we have more time and money than ever before, most of us have little sense of control over our own lives. It is all connected to the apathy that means fewer and fewer people vote. Politicians don’t listen to us anyway. Big business has all the power; religious extremism all the fear. But in the garden or allotment we are king or queen. It is our piece of outdoors that lays a real stake to the planet.

Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly!

There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.

We are a culture that relies on technology over community, a society in which spoken and written words are cheap, easy to come by, and excessive. Our culture says anything goes; fear of God is almost unheard of. We are slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.

The early settlers amazed her--they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch.

The modern human lives in a cesspool of man-made electromagnetic radiation.

When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.

While I still did not know what self- actualization that sat on the top level of the pyramid meant, I could believethat if I knew I would be able to say something positive about it as well inmy life.

He remembered believing there had been a time when monsters roamed the earth. The brave hearted fought flesh-and-blood dragons instead of shadowboxing their inner demons, the sport of modern man.

Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.

...we spend more time gazing at luminous screens than into the eyes of our loved ones.

With approximately 50% of the USA population on prescription drugs and 10% on anti-depressants, it is clear that things are going seriously wrong with human health in the modern world.

Unfortunately, you are far more likely to be harmed or die prematurely as a direct result of modern society than you are from any form of terrorism.

Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.

Addiction is the primary way people escape the modern world. Unfortunately, it is destroying the modern world.

People always knock what's new but I love the modern Internet, where cleverness is currency. Social media is a cleverness meritocracy. We're living in it.

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished.

As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.

It fascinated me how depression and anxiety overlap with post-traumatic stress disorder. Had we been through some trauma we didn't know about? Was the noise and speed of modern life the trauma for our caveman brains? Was I that soft? Or was life a kind of war most people didn't see?

Although we may wish for more or strive to do better than we have, in these times it is enough to keep your soul.

Venice was a contrast from Los Angeles itself, where you might see a woman with $15,000 tits, a face frozen in place by Botox, wobbling with her $4,000 Gucci bag right past a child with a sunken belly and exposed ribs encaging a heart too weak to scream.

He laid there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not a part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed.

We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.

Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.

Being busy is a distraction and I am sure that doing nothing, resting and sleeping are all good cures for modern life. I am not suggesting we all do nothing but sleep, however, sometimes stopping long enough to 'be' can be very powerful.

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.

It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

Sometime we forget to value the small things, that inspire us more than the large! We should learn from daily than planning stupid future.

There are so many simple things getting unnoticed in me, it makes me feel I am a robot!

Like a speeding trainI am passing by...I don’t knowwhere I’m headingwith whom or whyall I know is thatI will never, everpass from here againall I know is I’m skidding forwardon this track of life.

sometimes I hearscreaming like a childand wake upto find it’s me

Perhaps we now need to engineer scarcity in our communications, in our interactions, and in the things we consume. Otherwise our lives become like a Morse code transmission that's lacking breaks - a swarm of noise blanketing the valuable data beneath.

I felt like I wasn’t living thoroughly enough — I was distracted in ways I wouldn’t be if I’d been born in 1929.

Modern consumer life is a form of extreme passive violence against all people.

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose.

What organized dating sites fail to understand is that the people are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves.

Modern civilisation does not generate an ethical framework for human life.

Animal are more modern because they don't wear anything...!!!

Progress has not brought about universal happiness...

Now everything is done by machines, technology has relieved you of much work. What to do? You become aggressive, you fight, you get angry. Without any reason or rhyme, you become angry – suddenly you flare up. Everybody knows that this is foolish, even you in your cooler moments know that that was foolish. But why did you flare up unnecessarily? The excuse was not enough. The real reason is not that there was some situation; the real reason is you have so much energy, so much petrol overflowing, inflammable, that any moment it can be active. That is why after anger you feel relaxed, after anger you feel a little well-being coming to you.

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.

If Da Vinci had to tweet 5 times a day, we’d still be riding bicycles.

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free

I’m sorry to pull you out of your classes, but your adviser understands,” Kitteredge said. “He’s a friend of the family.”So that’s it, Neal thought. You bought me; you own me.

Life today has become a series of spectacles to be viewed, not actions to be lived.

Never forget that you live in an ecosystem designed to disrupt you and it will take you for a ride if you let it.

One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.

To be healthy in modern society, you must adopt the behaviors of an astronaut!

People these days can’t seem to tolerate one moment without entertainment!

In the city, strangers seldom meet beyond daily functions. Instead, they brush by with a haste and preoccupation that so defines a century of 'too little time'.