80s Quotes

“We can be heroes just for one day”
― David Bowie Heroes

“She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“We have work to do if you are not to be a total failure like high-waisted, acid-wash jeans.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.'

'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.

'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")”
― David J. Schow, Seeing Red

“Apparently, during the ‘80s, nobody really dressed like Madonna except for Madonna.”
― Gwen Hayes, Totally Tubular

“Ricky was a young boy, he had a heart of stone./Tequila in his heartbeat, his veins burned gasoline./18 and life you got it.”
― Skid Row

“I mean, my age is just a number. So what if you were born in the era when they still used rotary phones and cassette tapes? I think it’s cute.”
― T.S. Krupa, Safe & Sound

“In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice—all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.”
― Lori Majewski, Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s

“If you think the ’80s were dumber than the ’70s, either you weren’t there or you weren’t paying attention.”
― James Lileks, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s

“There may be a lot of kids in this world, but the stupid ones are always stupid in the same way.”
― Yongsoo Park, Las Cucarachas

“The sign in the forest said, “Closed For Repairs.” I wrote it and nailed it on a tree myself. I’m a farmer of parking lots, and I grow them like 1980s mall culture.”
― Jarod Kintz, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“En los ochenta, aún se escuchaban guitarras en las discotecas e incluso cuando sonaban esos niñatos de Hombres G, por más que arrugáramos la nariz con mohín despectivo, no podíamos dejar de corear que quiero comprarme un jersey a rayas. Entonces ()La música aún podía salvarnos. Fue justo antes de que se pusiera en marcha la trituradora de emociones, la mákina, la electrónica, el house, el trance, los miles de nombres para aludir a la victoria del frío.”
― Barbara Blasco

“Screws fall out all the time. The world's an imperfect place.”
― John Bender

“Most days Florence would proudly sport a halter top sans a brassiere and briskly march across her yard in crudely trimmed cut-off-jeans —her cheap flip flops flailing off her feet and her sagging breasts bouncing in cadence to her determination to find escape through a good time.”
― Angie Cavallari, Trailer Trash: an '80s Memoir

“If the festivities at Christmas and the New Year take the form of an in creasingly conventional hullabaloo - since we no longer have the winter solstice as our excuse in the electronic age, nor, in the age of Jesus Christ Superstar, that of the Nativity, nor even that of the snow and ice isolating each person in their own inner space and numbing the blood in the veins - if the end-of-year revels make people so anxious, it is because they are taking the measure of the twelve months that are to come, which they will slowly have to plough through one by one. It is the same with time today as it is with having a child: it is too long in the carrying, too long agrowing. We would like to have the chance to enjoy it right away, to have the fast-forwarded projection of the next century. Think how impatient we are for the year 2000, this whole millennium to get through, while we are already madly curious about the year 2020 and, no doubt, perfectly disenchanted as to what awaits us in '86. The celebrations of the millennium really are going to have to be brilliant to overcome the boredom we feel when we think of the next century.

If only we could at least know that there were merely one or two hundred years to go, that would make things more interesting. There is nothing like a catastrophe to usher in a millennium. They regenerate time in the same way as a cloudburst regenerates low water reserves. Yet it is time, real time, we are going to be short of. If the year 2000 does not happen, it will be because time will simply have disappeared, as winter has in some latitudes. But this is a dream. I fear that we won't have sufficient reserves to get to this point, and that the year 2000 will disappoint us as the year 1000 did by not bringing with it the end of the world.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Lijepim ljudima se otvara više vrata nego pametnima. Lijepi ljudi, iako ne istim putevima, mogu doći do stvari o kojima pametni ponekad mogu samo sanjati.”
― Viktoria Faust, Jackie - Intermezzo 4

“Girls don't fight."
The king and his men laughed heartily; Ash glittered with anger, her eyes bright as ice in the moonbeams.
"You speak an outrage," she said to Daisy. "What world is it where females don't fight! It must be a world devised by males, where they can triumph unopposed."
"-and foully dull it must be," finished the king. "Who wants an unarmed victory?”
― Ann Phillips, The Oak King and the Ash Queen

“The Lottery by Stewart Stafford

It was New York, 1984,
The AIDS tsunami roared in,
Friends, old overnight, no more,
Breathless, I went for a check-up.

A freezing winter's dawn,
A solitary figure before me,
What we called a drag queen,
White heels trembled in the cold.

"Hi, are you here to get tested?"
Gum chewed, brown eyes stared.
This was not my type of person,
I turned heel and walked away.

At month's end, a crippling flu,
The grey testing centre called,
Two hundred people ahead of me;
A waking nightmare all too real.

I gave up and turned to leave,
But a familiar voice called out:
"Hey, you there, come back!"
I stopped and turned around.

The drag queen stood there in furs,
But sicker, I didn't recognise them,
"Stand with me in the line, honey."
"Nah, I'm fine, I'll come back again."

"Support an old broad before she faints?"
A voice no longer frail but pin-sharp.
I got in line to impatient murmurs:
"If anyone has a problem, see me!"

Sylvester on boombox, graveyard choir.
My pal's stage name was Carol DaRaunch,
(After the Ted Bundy female survivor)
Their real name was Ernesto Rodriguez.

After seeing the doctor, Carol hugged me,
Writing down their number on some paper,
With their alias not their real name on it:
"Is this the number of where you work?"

"THAT is my home number to call me on.
THAT'S my autograph, for when I'm famous!"
"I was wrong about you, Carol," I said.
"Baby, it takes time to get to know me!"

A hug, shimmy, the threadbare blonde left.
A silent chorus of shuffling dead men walking,
Spartan results, a young man's death sentence.
Real words faded rehearsal, my eyes watered.

Two weeks on, I cautiously phoned up Carol.
The receiver was picked up, dragging sounds,
Like furniture being moved: "Is Carol there?"
"That person is dead." They hung up on me.

All my life's harsh judgements, dumped on Carol,
Who was I to win life's lottery over a guardian angel?
I still keep that old phone number forty years on,
Crumpled, faded, portable guilt lives on in my wallet.

© Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Not long after that, the questions came: Why you? Drag had been around forever. Why had I been able to crack the code after so many false starts and almosts?
But I knew they would never understand the delicate choreography I’d done to make it all work. I’d mastered the art of naughty-lite: two spoonfuls of Diana Ross, a pinch of Cher, a shake of Dolly Parton, all sealed with Walt Disney’s family-friendliness. Before, I had been blurry—confusing, a thing that only some people could understand. Finally, I had snapped into focus, just in time for the whole world to see.
The eighties, with all its excess and opulence, had also been marred by darkness: the heaviness of crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, the crashes of S&Ls in the markets. There was a yearning for levity in the culture, the very same irreverence and sense of play that had animated me my whole life.
A window opened. I stepped through it.”
― RuPaul, The House of Hidden Meanings