1990s Quotes

“Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of theGuardian,and then didn't attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I'd set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as 'The President We Deserve'. He reprinted it in London, under the title, 'The President They Deserve'. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of theNew Republic,had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. 'I don't think you quite get it,' he went on, after an honorable pause. 'That means you can't come to the party at all.' I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn't then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won't be slandered and won't refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“...those retrospectively blessed dozen years lasted from the chilly, fevered Central European night of November 9th, 1989 to that bright morning on the Eastern Seaboard of American of September 11th, 2001. One event symbolized the lifted threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust,
something which had been hanging over humanity for nearly forty years, and so ended an age of idiocy. The other ushered in a new one.”
― Iain Banks, Transition

“During the Bosnian war in the late 1990s, I spent several days traveling around the country with Susan Sontag and her son, my dear friend David Rieff. On one occasion, we made a special detour to the town of Zenica, where there was reported to be a serious infiltration of outside Muslim extremists: a charge that was often used to slander the Bosnian government of the time. We found very little evidence of that, but the community itself was much riven as between Muslim, Croat, and Serb. No faction was strong enough to predominate, each was strong enough to veto the other's candidate for the chairmanship of the city council. Eventually, and in a way that was characteristically Bosnian, all three parties called on one of the town's few Jews and asked him to assume the job. We called on him, and found that he was also the resident intellectual, with a natural gift for synthesizing matters. After we left him, Susan began to chortle in the car. 'What do you think?' she asked. 'Do you think that the only dentist and the only shrink in Zenica are Jewish also?' It would be dense to have pretended not to see her joke.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“This was 1991, remember. We didn't have the Internet. So, as teenagers, we lived on the phone. There was no webcamming, no social networking. We dreamt simply of having our own personal phone lines one day, along with uninterrupted hours to talk, and we rarely got that. No matter who we were talking to, no matter how private the conversation, parents picked up the phone accidentally, siblings demanded their time. The introduction of call waiting made all of this even worse, as it allowed aunts and uncles and people you didn't even know to butt in. This is part of why we talked so late in the night, Lindy and I, all of us teens. This is why we looked so pale in our grunge clothes. These night hours were the only times we felt we could tell the truth without danger, the only times we could live separately from our parents while still inside of their homes. There were no cell phones. No private text messages. It was simple one on one conversation and, if it was any good at all, you had to whisper.”
― M.O. Walsh

“The only good thing about the 1980s was that they invented rap, but rap didn't get good until 1992, so what does that say about the 1980s.”
― Drew

“We waited 45 years for the Americans to come and set us free... When I was a child, we used to say that even if the Americans were coming in a wheelbarrow, they should be here by now.”
― Taryn R. Hutchison, We Wait You: Waiting on God in Eastern Europe

“Kids are calling the 1990s the late 1900s. Just sayin.”
― Richie Norton

“The nineties were a fertile period for the self-indulgent genius.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Nineties

“It was probably the stupid glasses. How were you supposed to see anything wearing mirrored sunglasses underground? Any they were so nineties, they weren't even retro yet.”
― Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl

“She squeals. Like, the response you might give if you were a teenage girl in the late '90s and the Backstreet Boys walked into the room. And list, I'm no Brian Littrell.”
― Kerry Winfrey, Not Like the Movies

“There was no big book of the nineties.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“There was no great novel of the nineties. The last major books came out in the eighties, and they were Blood Meridian and then I’d say White Noise by Don DeLillo, who very well might have seen where everything was heading and whose work then articulated it all very well.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“1999 was a good year; pre-9/11, pre-Bush, bangin’ economy, the send-off to a pretty amazing decade and century.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“There was no great novel of the nineties. The last major books came out in the eighties, and they wereBlood Meridianand then I’d sayWhite Noiseby Don DeLillo, who very well might have seen where everything was heading and whose work then articulated it all very well.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The first thing I remember about Bucharest is how very dark it was.”
― Taryn R. Hutchison, We Wait You: Waiting on God in Eastern Europe

“Maddy, they said affectionately, come to our room and listen to tapes.”
― Caroline B. Cooney, Twins

“Is it a crime, she thought, to use some one else's funeral as your own? A crime to take over another's room and closet and life and cassettes and telephone number?”
― Caroline B. Cooney, Twins

“When I graduated from college, I sought out the cheapest rooms or apartments I could find. One of these put me next to a freeway interchange in Oakland California. The experience of living there, biking everywhere and reading the book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, changed my life and made me appreciate all the issues associated with transportation. I saw exactly how and why the freeway interchange gutted my neighborhood and how the main obstacle and danger to bicycling in urban areas was cars and drivers. This was the early 1990s when many people were waking up to these same issues. I participated in some of the first Critical Mass rides in San Francisco and the East Bay and started giving them my transportation cartoons for flyers and posters. I also discovered the (now defunct) “Auto-Free Times” and Alliance for a Paving Moratorium in Arcata, California and started sending them cartoons as well. By 1994 it had become a major theme in my work.

(2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)”
― Andy Singer

“Cobain is not the voice of our generation. He’s the angst. He is our frustration. Our anger.”
― Scott Thompson, Lost in ‘96