Top 100 Rob Sheffield Quotes
#1. Tacos will grow on Christmas trees before I learn to carry a tune. Fortunately, it doesn't matter. In karaoke, talent means nada; enthusiasm is everything. What I lack in talent, I make up for in passion. Hence my karaoke problem.
Rob Sheffield
#2. And they're right - what could be scarier, stupider, than
staying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified?
Rob Sheffield
#3. Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.
Rob Sheffield
#4. I grew up on country radio. You know I'm a sucker for that 'we got no money but we got love' crap.
Rob Sheffield
#5. A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.
Rob Sheffield
#6. He sang about girls in space-why not? That's where all the cool girls were. (They weren't where I could find them, that was for sure.)
Rob Sheffield
#7. Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it's bad for the baby
Rob Sheffield
#8. One of Renee's friends asked her, "Does your boyfriend wear glasses?" She said, "No, he wears a Walkman.
Rob Sheffield
#9. She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like "What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?" or "Why don't they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?
Rob Sheffield
#10. The country singers understand. It's always that one song that gets you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you. Country singers are always
twanging about that number on the jukebox they can't stand to hear you play, the one with the memories.
Rob Sheffield
#11. But right now, karaoke is one of the places where we go to form our own culture club, which is one of the millions of things a relationship is - building a shared language out of the things that fire up your blood. Couples need as many of those languages as they can get.
Rob Sheffield
#12. I didn't know what I was. I didn't have a noun.
Rob Sheffield
#13. That's the secret of 'True Blood' - all the creatures that roam Bon Temps become a metaphor for our insatiable lusts and inner desires. Humans craving what they can't have and those secret appetites transforming them into beasts, or even killers.
Rob Sheffield
#14. Anyone watching '30 Rock' always knew Tina Fey was playing a fictionalized version of herself, a workaholic comedy writer who also plays one on TV. She's the boss; Liz Lemon just works here.
Rob Sheffield
#15. Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.
Rob Sheffield
#16. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.
Rob Sheffield
#17. I hate when people question my ability to get from one place to another without mutilating myself. It's tantamount to saying, "Try to get home without screwing it up like last time, dummy," or "Farewell, for I may never see you again, given the mortality that awaits us all like a crouching panther.
Rob Sheffield
#18. Don't charge the mound. Once you agree to fight, you lost already. Don't start none, won't be none.
Rob Sheffield
#19. That's the rub about 'Community' - for all the high-concept cleverness, it really comes down to vulgar humanism, the dumbest kind of sentimental identification. We watch it because we like these people and we miss them when they don't show up. They become part of the stories we tell ourselves.
Rob Sheffield
#20. This is what they call "hitting rock bottom," and they call it that because it rocks.
Rob Sheffield
#21. Being a pop fan is a lot like Catholic devotion - lots of ritual, lots of ceremony ... We touch the icon to enter the sacred space, genuflecting to reliquaries and ostentatoria that make something splendid of our most secret desires and agonies.
Rob Sheffield
#22. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of life.
Rob Sheffield
#23. The main job requirement for a network-news anchor is thinking it's the only important job in the world. This is a field where solemn gravitas isn't a drawback; it's the whole point.
Rob Sheffield
#24. I had never been so extravagantly proud of having blood that clotted.
Rob Sheffield
#25. 'The Voice' has lots of singers who fit the 'Idol' mold of young, innocent ingenues with psycho stage moms. But it also has long-suffering adult pros, with a whiff of thirtysomething despair in their voices. That adds an edge of realness.
Rob Sheffield
#26. If the girls keep dancing, everybody's happy. If the girls don't dance, nobody's happy.
Rob Sheffield
#27. You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going to Be Friends
Rob Sheffield
#28. I had never gotten the hang of dating - I was always going to be somebody who either had a girlfriend or didn't.
Rob Sheffield
#29. In the old days, when a star left a still-thriving hit show, they'd celebrate by killing him or her off. But 'The Office' dispatched Michael Scott in a crueler and more final way: they made him normal. Since we're talking about Michael Scott, 'normal' might be stretching it, obviously.
Rob Sheffield
#30. 'Drive,' that's the one. I love dozens of songs by R.E.M., but that's the one, even though it took me 7 or 8 years to start liking it.
Rob Sheffield
#31. Rock stars did not invent burning out. They just do it louder.
Rob Sheffield
#32. One of the billions of things I love about Beyonce: The harder she tries to come on crazy, the less crazy she sounds.
Rob Sheffield
#34. You lose a certain type of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness.
Rob Sheffield
#35. It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I'd ever known.
Rob Sheffield
#36. When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.
Rob Sheffield
#37. You have blundered into an adult existence you don't understand, and you can't tell whether you planned it this way or whether you screwed up big-time, though it's too late either way.
Rob Sheffield
#38. 'I'll Tumble 4 Ya' has to be one of the most ridiculous hit singles that any international superstars have given the world.
Rob Sheffield
#39. When you want to start living, what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow?
Rob Sheffield
#40. My ears rang all the way home and I didn't want them to stop. It made me want to start something.
Rob Sheffield
#41. The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You are
there, my friend.
Rob Sheffield
#42. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.
Rob Sheffield
#43. Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.
Rob Sheffield
#44. It's kind of amazing how popular 'Grey's Anatomy' is. What other show can boast such an annoyingly sincere cast of doctors, sniveling through such perfunctory love triangles?
Rob Sheffield
#45. People who wave digital cameras at shows are the same people who sit in front of you at hockey games and wear those giant foam-rubber fingers that say, We're number one!'
Rob Sheffield
#46. It goes without saying that 'Buncha Losers' comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us 'Taxi,' 'Cheers' and the genre-defining 'Night Court,' a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
Rob Sheffield
#48. I was somebody's boyfriend now. This would mean a lot of trial and error. But she was who I wanted to try and err with.
Rob Sheffield
#49. I often took the bus to her apartment, where we drank bourbon and ginger ale, listened to the music we wanted to impress each other with, which eventually turned into listening to the music we actually liked.
Rob Sheffield
#50. For all karaoke freaks around the nation, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is one of those sacred anthems. It's the kind of song that announces, "Dearly beloved, we have so totally gathered here today.
Rob Sheffield
#51. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.
Rob Sheffield
#52. There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.
Rob Sheffield
#53. They're never technically tapes, but they're always called mix tapes anyway, just because tapes are always cool.
Rob Sheffield
#54. You know the Prince song where the girl's phone rings but she tells him, "whoever's calling couldn't be as cute as you?" I long to live out this moment in real life.
Rob Sheffield
#55. You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
Rob Sheffield
#56. 'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.
Rob Sheffield
#57. I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.
Rob Sheffield
#58. It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.
Rob Sheffield
#60. One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people's religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.
Rob Sheffield
#61. Donna Summer would be remembered as a ground-breaking artist today even if she'd retired the day after she recorded 'I Feel Love' in 1977.
Rob Sheffield
#62. I'd shut the whole world down just to tell you
Rob Sheffield
#63. Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you're in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship's gone, you're stuck knowing all this garbage.
Rob Sheffield
#64. Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.
Rob Sheffield
#65. We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us together. So now music was stuck with us.
Rob Sheffield
#66. Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-a-long.
Rob Sheffield
#67. But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it.
Rob Sheffield
#68. It was in that bubble after Vatican II when it seemed like the best time ever to grow up Catholic. It was a time when the church was so connected to the world.
Rob Sheffield
#69. At that moment, I knew she was the girl for me. Of course, we'd already been going out for a few weeks, so I wasn't, like, shocked or anything. But still, it's never not nice to to keep realizing.
Rob Sheffield
#70. 'So You Think You Can Dance' comes on as a high-minded leap up the evolutionary ladder from other reality shows - on this one, you're supposed to learn something, and the guest judges are fellow dance professionals rather than actual celebrities.
Rob Sheffield
#71. 'Revenge' is a shameless soap in the style of Eighties shoulder-pad slap-offs like 'Dallas,' 'Dynasty' and 'Falcon Crest.' Yet there's no wink-wink camp.
Rob Sheffield
#72. In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt's funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap.
Rob Sheffield
#73. Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that's just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that's been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.
Rob Sheffield
#74. Morrissey was my Mrs. Garrett, the house mother from the Facts of Life, a soothing adult figure giving me words of wisdom.
Rob Sheffield
#75. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.
Rob Sheffield
#76. Thanks for existing, R.E.M. It's hard to overstate how much these guys changed everything, creating an entire rock audience in their own image.
Rob Sheffield
#77. I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an alter boy back home, so I served two masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles - it was like being a glamrock roadie for God.
Rob Sheffield
#78. I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.
Rob Sheffield
#79. The hottest trash-disco star in the world: Ke$ha! She has a lot in common with Kiss, actually, even spelling her name with a dollar sign the way Gene Simmons probably always wanted to.
Rob Sheffield
#80. He said 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn't seem so different from Catholicism - the hemlines were just a little higher.
Rob Sheffield
#81. I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.
Rob Sheffield
#82. It was R.E.M. who showed other Eighties bands how to get away with ignoring the rules - they lived in some weird town nobody never heard of, they didn't play power chords, they probably couldn't even spell 'spandex.' All they had was songs.
Rob Sheffield
#83. 'Buncha Losers' comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre's 'No Exit,' but then they had to ruin it with a lesson at the end.
Rob Sheffield
#84. Like most fans of 'So You Think You Can Dance,' I wouldn't know a pasodoble if it beat me with a rake.
Rob Sheffield
#85. Baseball's Opening Day is full of time-honored traditions: the President throws out the first ball, the Cubs' starting pitcher walks away with a 54.00 ERA, the Royals get mathematically eliminated from the pennant race.
Rob Sheffield
#86. Ah, the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either, it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationship.
Rob Sheffield
#87. There are all kinds of mix tapes. there is always a reason to make one.
Rob Sheffield
#88. It's a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving.
Rob Sheffield
#89. Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.
Rob Sheffield
#90. One of the best moments of any Liars show is hearing the crowd squawk 'We're doomed! We're doomed!' on cue during 'We Fenced Other Houses with the Bones of Our Own.' Maybe not the most uplifting audience sing-along in the indie rock world, but one of the most reliably entertaining.
Rob Sheffield
#91. Renee loved to do things. That was mysterious to me, since I was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them. She liked passion. She liked adventure. I cowered from passion and talked myself out of adventure.
Rob Sheffield
#92. It takes only one bad amp to turn your ears to oatmeal: That's how old hippies became Yanni fans.
Rob Sheffield
#93. Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s, and music for adults sucked even worse; whether we're talking about Kathleen Turner flicks or Sting albums, the decade's non-teen culture has no staying power at all.
Rob Sheffield
#94. Ron Swanson is more than the MVP of the 'Parks and Recreation' squad, more than just the funniest character on TV - he's the perfect depiction of aggrieved American manhood at the twilight of the empire.
Rob Sheffield
#95. When you're a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you "offer it up", as a sacrificial gift.
Rob Sheffield
#96. Somtimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person's home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won't get to take stock of until its too late
Rob Sheffield
#97. ... .For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screaming, Pearl JAM! Pearl JAM! Now this is rock and roll! Jeremy's SPO-ken! But he's still al-LIIIIIVE!
Rob Sheffield
#98. Nothing connects to the moment like music. I count the music to bring me back, or more precisely, to bring her forward.
Rob Sheffield
#99. Love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it's not a competition; there's plenty of pain to go around.
Rob Sheffield
#100. When Ke$ha tries to rap like L'Trimm, she sounds like any ordinary lonely teenage girl stuck in a nowhere town, singing along to her radio and dreaming of a party where she's the star. Ke$ha's greatness is that in her voice, you can hear both the loser girl and the star. All hail the Queen of Noi$e!
Rob Sheffield
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