The Nineties Quotes

“The texture is what mattered. The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time.
It is not the thinking now.
Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“Once consumers experienced free music, they came to view music as something that was supposed to be free.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“Every time period that’s ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism ‘May you live in interesting times’ did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“The concept of “selling out”—and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything—is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“The flavor was nothing like beer. It was closer to cheap champagne mixed with Sprite, and—unlike beer—it was the opposite of an acquired taste. Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima. There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“I don’t understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway,” sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. “Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“the Mandela Effect is a collective delusion in which large swaths of the populace misremember a catalog of indiscriminate memories in the same way.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live-action show on television. It altered the language and shifted comedic sensibilities, and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn’t there.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one’s own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“A person native to the twenty-first century can’t really reconcile why anyone would pay $13.25 for twelve fixed songs that could only be played on specific high-end electronics serving no other function; the majority of all recorded music can now be instantly accessed anywhere for less than $10 a month.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“First, a dial tone, followed by eleven rapid beeps from an invisible push-button telephone. This was followed by three or four high-pitched electronic whistles, collapsing into a longer whistle resembling the flatlining of a dying patient hooked to an EKG machine (this was the sound of the phone line’s echo suppression being disabled). There were a few more beeps absorbed into a wall of white noise, and then the white noise abruptly doubled, meaning the receiving modem was now interacting with the calling modem. There was an instant where it sounded like something inside the computer had broken, spontaneously repaired by the digital interplay of two probing modulators, similar in pitch to a metal detector passing over a pocket watch. This was bookended by another fleeting second of white noise, and then . . . silence.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“a phone without an answering machine would ring incessantly until the caller gave up. You had to answer the phone in order to stop the phone. But the main reason everyone always answered the telephone was the impossibility of knowing who was on the line. Every ringing phone was, potentially, a life-altering event. It might be a telemarketer, but it also might be a death in the family. It could be your next-door neighbor, but it could also be the governor, and there was only one way to find out.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“Modern people hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century—the kind of people who voted for Bill Clinton twice and (perhaps) saw fragments of their own lives within the problems he created for himself. And it was, in all probability, the last time in history such problems would be considered worthy of contemplation.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“There are entrenched ideas (both positive and negative) about what the internet is, conceded even by those who disagree with the veracity of the assertions: the way it refigures politics and social organization, the degree to which it alters the experience of adolescence, its contradictory ability to connect and estrange simultaneously, and its overall acceleration of the news cycle.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties: A Book

“Part of the Gen X irony fixation was the result of so much accepted obviousness: When you made a TV show about the seventies, you could just call it That ’70s Show. Was that title clever, or was that title lazy? It was impossible to know.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties