Top 100 Postmodern Quotes
#1. Stroll on. When the going gets tough, the postmodern analyst goes shopping.
Chris Jenks
#2. The body of work I create combines traditional storylines and postmodern narrative strategies to approach themes such as belonging, identity politics and conflict, as well as the push towards - and resistance against - modernization.
Aman Mojadidi
#3. Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.
Brad S. Gregory
#4. The overriding sense of Tokyo ... is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.
David Rakoff
#5. Creative persuasion is a matter of being biblical, not of being either modern or postmodern.
Os Guinness
#6. The postmodern worldview denies that there is such a thing as truth: historical, moral, or otherwise. It denies that truth exists independently of our perspectives and interests.
Mark Earley
#7. The biggest problem facing our world today is a lack of hope and a lack of meaning. [It's] basically just a postmodern world in which there is no right or wrong, no better or worse.
Jon Foreman
#8. I've purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don't think anybody's written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
Dave Eggers
#10. Our stable and eternal verities are being challenged. There's a kind of postmodern breakdown in journalism. The breadth of information sources and the speed of transmission are growing; but the traditional gravity of news has eroded. -Jin Yongquan
Judy Polumbaum
#11. By exclaiming that "there are no absolute truths" the postmodern stance is also claiming that the statement it just made is an absolute truth - trying to have it both ways, rejecting absolutism with absolutism.
Gudjon Bergmann
#12. Sometimes ... we don't want to feel like a postmodern, postfeminist, overstretched woman but, rather, a domestic goddess, trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake.
Nigella Lawson
#13. They weren't really looking for repentance; postmodern irony would do. When
Douglas Wilson
#14. They don't try to trade 'reality', they try to trade
other people's perceptions of reality. If a market is dominated by enough technical traders, it could lapse into a 'postmodern' state, with traders trading perceptions of perceptions of reality.
Brett Scott
#15. It's impossible in our postmodern era for anyone to be original
for anybody to do what Jackson Pollock did ...
Irving Sandler
#16. I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
Kate Atkinson
#17. I'm a modern man, a man for the millennium, digital and smoke-free. A diversified multicultural postmodern deconstructionist. Politically, anatomically, and ecologically incorrect.
Mike Nelson
#18. Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.
John Walford
#19. Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.
Veronica Hollinger
#20. In theatre, presence is the matrix of power; the postmodern theatre of resistance must therefore both expose the collusion of presence with authority and resist such collusion by refusing to establish itself as the charismatic Other.
Philip Auslander
#21. I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.
John Irving
#22. I'm a postmodern commentator, and so, in a cheeky parallel to James Joyce or James Kelman, I get to places, verbally, that are a little unusual - when I talk about Jocky Wilson and end up sounding like a Jackson Pollock of the commentary box.
Sid Waddell
#23. This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products
Larry McCaffrey
#24. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.
Donna J. Haraway
#25. I'm in a house where if the washing machine shuts off, it sings a song. If iPad gets a message, it sings a song. I'm living in a real postmodern time - every single thing sings to you to tell you it's started, it's stopped, you've got a message, you didn't get a message ...
Abel Ferrara
#26. Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.
Patrice Pavis
#27. Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern
thinker.
Muriel Barbery
#28. Lyotard has described the postmodern condition succinctly as "incredulity towards metanarratives":' an attitude commendable in itself, no doubt, but also one that can easily be translated into a dogmatic metanarrative of its own. In
David Bentley Hart
#29. In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.
David F. Wells
#30. Christianity is facing something of an identity crisis. Who are we to be to the twenty-first-century world? How should the church position itself in the postmodern culture? Through what cultural languages will the gospel be best communicated in this turbulent time?
Brett McCracken
#31. It would take a while before the postmodern Narcissus perceived the ruins of society behind the emptiness of his mirror.
Paul Verhaeghe
#32. Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published 'V.' The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon.
Paul Di Filippo
#33. It is almost impossible to get anyone with a postmodern slant to say "I think" and stand by what follows, without making sure that the person listening understands, "Of course, there are other things to consider.
Gudjon Bergmann
#34. I realized that my truest passion was for helping people change through faith in a higher power. That meant, for me, belonging to the church. Using my abilities to bring Christian doctrine to a postmodern world.
James McGreevey
#35. Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#36. I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times, for it privileges the practices and intellectual formations of modernity. Calling this a postmodern age reproduces the modernist assumption that history must be policed by periods.
Stanley Hauerwas
#37. I like the idea of being a postmodern moral philosopher - or perhaps a perverse moral philosopher.
Richard Marshall
#38. We live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.
Vaclav Havel
#39. Centerless pop-culture country full of marginalized subnations that are themselves postmodern, looped, self-referential, self-obsessed, voyeuristic, passive, slack-jawed, debased.
D.T. Max
#40. Postmodern people have been rejecting Christianity for years, thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism.
Timothy Keller
#41. Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.
Brad Holland
#42. [Postmodern photography] implies the exhaustion of the image universe: it suggests that a photographer can find more than enough images already existing in the world without the bother of making new ones.
Andy Grundberg
#43. "Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality.
Ken Wilber
#44. One of the stated goals of the postmodern movement in architecture was a greater sensitivity to the people who live in or use newly designed buildings.
Martin Filler
#45. We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.
Andrew O'Hagan
#46. Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.
Roger Ebert
#47. A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#48. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the Web. There is something profoundly postnational about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the postmodern world, whether we want to be or not.
William Gibson
#49. The subject of feminism cannot be purely a fiction, as some postmodern writers suggest, produced by the discourses of power.
Alison Assiter
#50. If the kingdom of God had departments, we'd want to work in research and development. We felt like Jesus didn't hang out at the synagogue, he hung out at wells. Coffeehouses are postmodern wells. Let's not wait for people to come to us, let's go to them.
Mark Batterson
#51. It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.
Roger Scruton
#52. Classical apologetics operates with a very modern notion of reason; "presuppositional" apologetics, on the other hand, is postmodern (and Augustinian!) insofar as it recognizes the role of presuppositions in both what counts as truth and what is recognized as true.
James K.A. Smith
#53. The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good character, or give a good ending to a bad character. That's probably not a very postmodern thing to say.
Kate Atkinson
#54. I don't love the postmodern statement: "You shouldn't be spiritual if you are the artist."
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#55. I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.
Noah Baumbach
#56. Shift from modern nuclear family to the postmodern permeable family.
David Elkind
#57. In this century of hyper-postmodern ideals, with the digital future, we're segmented into different people, places, and things in a constant state of change.
John Van Hamersveld
#58. Don't you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth. Any more than it's going to topple a skyscraper. There's truth, and there's belief. Don't call a mule a stallion.
Carol Plum-Ucci
#59. Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes - affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism - the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.
Victor Davis Hanson
#60. A little of this, a little of that - a little of me, a little of you - put it together what do you have? postmodern soup ...
John Geddes
#62. Just like those other black holes from outer space, Hollywood is postmodern to this extent: it has no center, only a spreading dead zone of exhaustion, inertia, and brilliant decay.
Arthur Kroker
#63. I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
Aleksandar Hemon
#64. Healing must always seek to give voice to suffering, and the greater the range of words and meanings we have at our disposal, the clearer the voice becomes.
Iona Heath in BMJ 2000;320:125 ( 8 January) Review of the book Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age by David Morris
Iona Heath
#65. Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really "need" anything new, so we only create what we want.
Chuck Klosterman
#66. Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#67. The idea that it's unloving to defend truth or confront lies is one of the arrogant opinions of this postmodern age that needs to be torn down (2 Cor. 10:5). Authentic love "rejoices with the truth" (1 Cor. 13:6).
Anonymous
#68. Mystery Science Theater is really a postmodern show, it's really derived of many influences.
Joel Hodgson
#69. It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.
Fredric Jameson
#70. The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#71. The films I grew up loving, and the art that I love, is not generally the kind of postmodern ironic winking stuff. What lasts is the stuff in which the artists are totally in league with the subject.
James Gray
#72. In a postmodern world where all religious activity is seen as what we do for God, we need to proclaim Christianity is about what God has done for us.
Jefferson Bethke
#73. Postmodern comedy doesn't work well with very old audiences, because it's making fun of the comedy they enjoy.
Bo Burnham
#74. The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan.
Christine Pelosi
#75. when it comes to the postmodern applications and contemporary relevance of depth psychology, the Jungian perspective is where the action is.
Christopher Hauke
#77. What is Southern California but an ever-changing dreamscape backdrop for the postmodern ideal? The psychology of the postmodern world is the continual state of change as we live in its idealist manufactured dream, built by developers.
John Van Hamersveld
#78. The faith engaged with Platonism in the ancient world, with Aristotle in the medieval world, with nominalism in the Reformation era, and with rationalism in the modern world. Now the church must engage with the emergence of a postmodern, post- Christian, neo-pagan world.
Robert E. Webber
#79. The multiverse model offers an elegantly postmodern solution to character stasis in a market-driven serial publishing system which privileges constancy over major change.
Jose Alaniz
#80. In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.
Jeremy Begbie
#81. Each time, Lippmann would talk a mile a minute, and Danny and Vinny would stare in wonder. Their meetings acquired the flavor of a postmodern literary puzzle: The story rang true even as the narrator seemed entirely unreliable.
Michael Lewis
#82. Los Angeles is a true postmodern city. Here, we celebrate with equal aplomb the high and the low. I am just as influenced by the punk rock attitude of local skate and surf cultures as I am by old-school glamour and stardust.
Liz Goldwyn
#83. There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel - it's that postmodern thing - it's more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being's experience.
Andre Dubus III
#84. Weber sandstone a billion years old. This rock was Precambrian, I read, a term like postmodern, suggesting that what it names is so mysterious as to require identification by what it isn't.
Jim Paul
#85. in a postmodern world, even gods and sacred objects must travel or lose their vitality; any deity that remained stuck in its place and original purpose would soon become moribund.
Okey Ndibe
#86. I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.
Kathy Acker
#87. Judge not lest ye be judged" has become the battle cry not only for biblically illiterate secularists, but for professing evangelicals as well. Postmodern hypersensitivity is not a malady merely for unbelievers; Christians are downright allergic to judging.
Todd Friel
#88. I am a postmodern romantic. I try to use their way to photograph, and at the same time, incorporate the problems that I feel in a country like Guatemala.
Luis Gonzalez
#89. In the end, postmodern art is obscene not because it is offensive, but because it is boring.
Gregory Benford
#90. The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.
Alan Hirsch
#91. it sometimes seems to me the entire postmodern assault on the concept of truth has been staged to avoid just this conclusion: some cultures are simply more productive than others
Andrew Klavan
#92. This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
David Foster Wallace
#93. I love the fact that I can go to a museum now that tells me I'm in the postmodern age.
Fred D'Aguiar
#94. Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but ... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'
Robert Wilson
#95. No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.
Philip K. Dick
#96. So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
David Mitchell
#97. The common-sense notion that 'There is a time and place for everything' gets carried into a set of prescriptions which replicate the social order by assigning social meanings to spaces and times.
David Harvey
#98. The words marriage and divorce were always used together, like they went hand in hand together.
Jess C. Scott
#99. The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#100. Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.
Michael Rogin
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
