White Tears Quotes

“Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world. Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough, he would be able to listen to ancient times.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don't remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems in vain. You stow your bag, show your ticket, climb the steps. All the sinners climb aboard.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“On your record deck, you played the sound of the middle passage, the blackest sound. You wanted the suffering you didn't have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk, the admiring glances of your friends. Then came the terror when real darkness first seeped through the walls of your bedroom, the walls designed to keep you safe and dreaming. And finally your rising sense of shame when you admitted to yourself that you were relieved the walls were there. The shame of knowing that you would do nothing, that you would allow it all to carry on.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don’t remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems to be in vain.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“People always look aroused when they’re acting violently.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“There is always more to New York. More than you’ve seen or care to see.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“what happens when people repeat the same gestures for forty years after they lose all meaning.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Nostalgia: from the Greek “nostos”—homecoming—and “algos” pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Distance can create longing. It can open up the gap into which all must fall.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don’t remember it at all.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“I don't want you, she said, but it's the quickest way to end it. Sometimes you're with a guy and you know you're the only door he'll leave through.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“I let my guard down. I let myself fall. Nostalgia: from the Greek “nostos”—homecoming—and “algos” pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Now I am nostalgic for the future, which was my native land.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“The present is dry, but add reverb and you can hear time reverse its flow, slipping on into the past, into echo and disaster.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“The end is the same, however it comes. They lay me down and cover me in the cold dark earth. Lay me down in the mud with hate in my heart. I ought to have made that session, ought to have walked through the door of the Saint James Hotel. Instead I'm twenty-seven years old and rotting in the levee with hate in my heart. Starless desolation in my heart. I was never paid for the whip and the gun, never paid for the work I done.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Fuck humanity, was my basic position at that point.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“People want to get back to the source. The old school. They want things they can touch.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“At nineteen, you can be very accepting, if something is presented to you as normal. You don’t know, so you pretend you’re experienced, you play along.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“She looked at me as if I’d spoken to her in binary code. I understand that my precision amuses people. I just don’t know how to mitigate it. It takes effort to be vague,”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Around me are people from the Reagan era, warehoused in sweat pants and sneakers, wreathed in cigarette smoke, drinking themselves to death.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“I think the meaning of private property had never quite sunk in for me until then; its weight, its peculiar authority. Privacy was disconnection, the power to take a section of the world offline. —It’s not that we own it, said Carter, as if reading my mind. We’re just maintaining the asset for future generations.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“each of them took a picture of himself and set about posting it to social media. Hashtags #flyprivate #highlife #goodlife. No doubt their feeds also had pictures of their watches and bar bills.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“The executive running the meeting had walnut skin and a facelift that made him look like a pilot in a centrifuge,”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“the clubs in the Village, the ones that trade on the fantasy that as you eat your bad burger you’ll be transported to the wild and swinging bebop era and all the city breakers and European backpackers at the tables around you will magically morph into angelheaded hipsters burning like roman candles in the night.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Nostalgia: from the Greek “nostos”—homecoming—and “algos” pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Now I am nostalgic for the future, which was my native land.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“I hated their music and the whole Rolling Stones junkie troubadour bullshit that went along with it, but it was an opportunity and we made sure we didn’t screw up.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Money was Carter’s invisible helper, a friendly ghost making things happen in the background. Cars arrived, restaurant tabs got picked up. When it was time to change scenery, money dissolved the city into a beach or a ski lodge. The thing was never to point out that this was happening. Since I couldn’t work out how I came to be there, why I was Carter’s faithful squire instead of some other studio engineer, none of it seemed real. It was all illusion, red dust, shit turning up in FedEx boxes. When Carter decided we were going to set up a recording studio, it just sprang into existence. He came into my room one day with the keys to a building by the water in Williamsburg. We cycled over and there it was. Contractors were already at work, installing soundproofing, building partition walls. The gear was magnificent, none of it new, always with a history, everything at least forty years old, tube amps and sixties fuzzboxes and a desk certified to have once been installed at Fame studios in Muscle Shoals. Vocals went through a pair of nineteen-fifties AKG C12’s that cost fifteen thousand dollars. When the remodeling was finished, we plugged in and started looking for business. Six months out of college and I was in New York, running a fucking studio. Carter had a very particular idea about what he wanted to do. We were billing ourselves as audio craftsmen, artisans of analog. We would even offer to record to quarter-inch tape, if that’s what the client wanted. He knew a place that could press from it, so we could make vinyl records of new music that hadn’t been digitized at any stage of production. Ye olde stereophonicke sounde. Step”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“Living things are those that resist entropy. They possess a boundary of some kind, a membrane or a skin — a metabolism — the ability to react to the world and to make copies, to pass something on.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“When you listen to an old record, there can be no illusion that you are present at a performance. You are listening through a gray drizzle of static, a sound like rain. You can never forget how far away you are. You always hear it, the sound of distance in time. But what is the connection between the listener and the musician? Does it matter that one of you is alive and one is dead, and which is which?”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“When you are powerless, your belief or disbelief is irrelevant. No one gives a damn about what you believe. But if some reality believes in you, then you must live it. You can’t say, “No thank you.” You can’t say, “I don’t want this.” If horror believes in you, there’s nothing to be done.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears