Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

In this era in which we live, the old-fashioned virtues grow increasingly unpopular.

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

I started my career in an era when footballers were different. There was a different culture.

As we encounter new experiences with a mindful and wise attention, we discover that one of three things will happen to our new experience: it will go away, it will stay the same, or it will get more intense. whatever happens does not really matter.

These are the times, the times of our own, these are the shapes the world we formed.

To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are.

I like to have a good experience. That's all you have.

People treat life as though it's the dress rehearsal for some big show. It's not. This is it.

That's the funny thing about life. We're rarely aware of the bullets we dodge. The just-misses. The almost-never-happeneds. We spend so much time worrying about how the future is going to play out and not nearly enough time admiring the precious perfection of the present.

There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.

Each moment presents what happens.

The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.

You can lead a happy life if you recognize that it's limited and completely unpredictable from one moment to the next.

We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on.

I do think awful things may happen at any moment, so while they are not happening, you may as well be pleased.

Today is all we have, tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.

But before we face experience, that miserable enemy, let us have some more innocence, just for a while.