Fandom Quotes

“It's more than fandom when a story touches you so hard that you wish the characters were your family”
― Lisa Taddeo, Three Women

“Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the hour held just as much or more importance to us as the newspaper that usually went from doorstep to garbage bin unread, and we speculated about the future lives of the characters that populated decayed mansions or desert isles as if they weren't inventions of other human minds.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“Infatuation is irrational but it can be a precursor to introspection. The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time. Screaming at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.”
― Kaitlyn Tiffany, Everything I Need I Get from You

“What begins as taste becomes religion”
― Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club

“Fandom has a nasty tendency to absorb the surface appearances of a thing without ever bothering to internalize its underlying message.

Huh. I guess it is just like a religion”
― Fred Van Lente, The Con Artist

“Ketika BTS membagi rasa sakitnya dan ARMY mencurahkan problem serta cerita kesulitannya melalui surat, media sosial, atau Fancafe, lalu BTS membuatkan lagu, rasanya ARMY seperti memiliki seorang teman, kekasih, kakak, atau orang tua yang akan mereka dengarkan.”
― Lea Yunkicha, BTS X ARMY In the Love Maze

“We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that give…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.’

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest.

The moral? There is no great homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it.

‘To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Fandom is externally generated branding.”
― Zoe Fraade-Blanar, Superfandom: How Our Obsessions are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are

“No use provoking the die-hard fans if you didn’t have to.”
― Danika Stone, Internet Famous

“At the same time, whenever a group of people comes together, there are issues of social standing, popularity, norms and identity on which they will inevitably not agree. Fandom is no exception.”
― Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships

“Men, altså – Harry,” vedblev kæmpen og vendte sig bort fra den skræmte Dursley-familie.

Jeg ønsker dig en rigtig go’ fødselsdag. Jeg har en gave til dig.

Måske er jeg kommet til at sidde på den, men den smager sikkert lige så godt for det.”

Han fremdrog en lettere mast æske fra inderlommen af sin sorte overfrakke.

Harry åbnede den med rystende fingre og fandt en stor, klistret chokoladekage, hvorpå der stod med grøn glasur: Tillykke med fødselsdagen Harry.”

(Harry Potter og De Vises sten, J.K. Rowling)”
― J.K. Rowling

“I could feel his smile on my lips—the best kind of kiss.

-Alice in Winterland: A Fangirl Novel”
― D.K.S.Dhara

“The 'knowing field'... denotes a place that is both inside each of us, and something notionally shared by everyone else in the fan base.”
― Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture

“As fandom scholars who are also music lovers, we have focused on the noon heat of passion, not the ways in which fandom can wax and wane. Even the precise reasons why any particular individual's fandom might end have rarely been examined and are poorly understood. Fandom always just seems there. Our relative blindness to its beginnings, endings and history is endemic to the field.”
― Mark Duffett, Fan Identities and Practices in Context: Dedicated to Music

“Part of being a fan means recognizing that Austen belongs equally to all of us even as we feel viscerally that everyone else has got her utterly wrong. Like all fans we are by necessity irrational creatures.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“You don't know Max and Emmy in real life?'

'I know them in real life. It's not like they're pretending to be somebody else just because they're online.”
― Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters

“When she was doing other things—schoolwork, chores, exercising—Madi had to work to keep herself interested. Writing was the opposite. Finishing a blog always left her more ‘full’ than empty.”
― Danika Stone

“Political fandom is much like entertainment fandom, many people invest money, emotions, and faith in a person they never met and foolishly expect that figure will always make them happy.”
― C.A.A. Savastano

“Fandom takes care of my cat when I go on vacation. I sit in the waiting room to take fandom home after wisdom teeth removals. Fandom comes to get me at LAX in the middle of the night when my flight is delayed for eight hours and my luggage has been sent to Australia by mistake. I bring Liquid Plummer to fandom when its toilet explodes. Fandom brings me ginger cookies and sits with me on my stoop when I stupidly lock myself out of my apartment. Fandom, friendom, and familydom all run on a gradient line in my brain.”
― Allyson Beatrice, Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby?: And Other True Adventures from a Life Online

“Past the age of four, it suddenly becomes unacceptable and weird to dress up as an elf, or fashion a cape out of an old blanket and pretend to "fly" down the sidewalk. It stops being cute at some point. However, it is acceptable for a fifty-two-year-old man to paint a bull's-eye on his giant gut and jiggle it while naked from the waist up in twenty-degree weather behind the goal post at a Packers game, while wearing a giant wedge of cheese on his head. People in traffic watching him walk into the game may point and laugh, but they're laughing with him. It's acceptable. He's a Great Big Fan Displaying Team Spirit!”
― Allyson Beatrice, Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby?: And Other True Adventures from a Life Online

“While male media fans fear being perceived as not sexual enough, female fans fear being categorized as too sexual, or at the very least too emotional.”
― Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships

“As the public shaming of the Twihard moms for their display of desire illustrates, one of the sources of shame for women is the culture's containment of and discomfort with female sexuality.”
― Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships

“Fandom itself buys into the stereotype of the overly emotional, crazy fangirl on a regular basis. In fact, fans have internalized such a strong sense of shame that they've projected it onto the objects of their affection, expressing fear that the celebrities are either terrified or disgusted by their own female fans.”
― Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships

“Cicioni suggests, as we will here, that rather than being a stimulus for social change, participating in fandom, including writing fanfiction, provides a safety valve for the stress women feel in their daily lives and relationships. Fandom is not only, as is often theorized, about subversive and societal change-but also about pleasurable and individual change, with challenges to existing norms and power relations more a byproduct than the source of fans' motivation and satisfaction.”
― Lynn S. Zubernis, Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships

“When a Guru points His finger towards the truth, His disciples try to look at the truth. But His crazy fans remain fixed to the finger and say, 'How glorious is this finger! How glorious must be the truth this glorious finger is pointing towards! I will look at the truth one day but right now let me sing glories of this finger.”
― Shunya

“Most writers write from fandom, fantasy, or fiction. I write from experience, truth, and my heart.”
― Drue Grit

“. One of the very few positive memories I had of school was my tiny group of friends. We’d sit in the hall before class and exchange notebooks full of fanfiction and sketchbooks full of fanart. Like so many kids who thought they’d stay friends forever, we drifted apart after graduation. Those geeky days behind most of them, yet I was stuck in the same mindset.”
― Quiana Glide, Cosplay Worthy

“Like everyone else in fandom, Ada and I say I love you to each other like it's punctuation. But lately I've been finding it harder to say it to her because I've discovered that I mean it more seriously than I thought. Even just typing those three words requires an effort that feels deeply and nauseatingly physical, like reaching into my own ribcage and turning my lungs inside out.”
― Cynthia So, If You Still Recognise Me

“They come to laugh and to learn, to dance and to listen, to admire and to be admired, to teach and to be taught, to question their assumptions about Jane and to confirm them.”
― Ted Scheinman, Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

“We find happiness in a kaleidoscope of stories: in books, in comics, in dance, in podcasts, in film and TV shows and video games. We find happiness in cosplaying as our favorite characters, and going to meet-and-greets with our favorite celebrities, and Dimension Door-ing onto the back of an Ancient Black Dragon, and finger-gunning Magic Missiles with our murder-hobo friends in a weekly session of Dungeons and Dragons. We all deserve to be happy, and love what we love, and be unironically enthusiastic about it. There is a magic in fandom that there rarely is anywhere else—where you can raise a TV show from the dead, and un-fridge a favorite character, and write fanfic that becomes canon. It is the kind of magic that brings our far corners of the world together.”
― Ashley Poston, The Princess and the Fangirl