Adam Levin Quotes & Sayings

And that is why, when he finally did come across the street, I lit my cigarette with my lighter - not to make him feel like a fool who had fallen for a trick, but rather because he had said, 'you had better luck with matches,' when in fact I had not. It was not the matches that brought him across the street. It was the matches that kept him on the bench. — Adam Levin

Let us be as the Cage has never been able to make us. Let us now all at once face forward in our boxes, still and silent as nightmares.
We did. — Adam Levin

..and if you're reckless enough to back talk me, you're reckless enough to think you understand girls like June Watermark, and you don't understand her because she's crazy and crazy people-they're misunderstood. It's why they are called crazy. And you probably think you're in love with her-it's what Boystar told me you said in the Office, and that's a fine thing to say to a girl, but if you think you mean it, it's a different story. Because what's love without understanding Gurion? A fucken lie it is. — Adam Levin

Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah. — Adam Levin

We can't just have everything without complications, you and I. There'd be no story without complications. With nothing to overcome, we'd die unstoried deaths. — Adam Levin

Books are truer than movies. — Adam Levin

Since bad timing could mean almost anything, it was a certain kind of truth. A low kind. — Adam Levin

The further south the throng went, the more reasons it discovered. Vendettas once sworn for half-forgotten offenses were remembered and invented with each passing blow. Everyone felt like a conduit of justice. — Adam Levin

...I know there are a number of things you know, probably too many things you know--too many, I say, not because any kind of knowledge has the capacity to be bad in itself, but rather because certain kinds of knowledge, particularly those kinds we often describe as arcane, can, by way of their very arcanity, serve to obscure the knowledge-bearer's understanding of the mundane. — Adam Levin

With your Social Security number in the wind, whoever finds it - or, more likely, whoever buys it on one of the many black-market information exchanges on the deep web - holds the keys to every part of your life. What that means - plain and simple - is that you're going to need an efficient way to keep one eye over your shoulder, all the time. — Adam Levin

All the word's indeed a page and we must loudly tear it. — Adam Levin

I liked it when things went together like that. Not just timing things like the chop/ flick/ knock-stopping, but space things, too. Like all the man-made products that fit into other man-made products that were not made by the same men or for the same reasons. Like how the sucking wand of my parents' vacuum held seven D batteries stacked nub to divot, and my Artgum eraser, before I'd worn it down, sat flush in any slot of the ice-cube tray, and the ice-cube tray sat flush on the rack in the toaster oven, the oven itself between the wall and the sink-edge. I liked how the rubber stopper in the laundry-room washtub was good for corking certain Erlenmeyer flasks and that 5 mg. Ritalins could be stored in the screw-hollows on the handles of umbrellas.
The Instructions (pp. 29-30) — Adam Levin

You only taste your own dignity right before you puke it up. — Adam Levin

Nonetheless, he is a boy. Despite his talents, a boy. And a boy is more idealistic than a man, and high ideals in the hands of children can be as dangerous as weapons. He thought he was in the right, and because he thought he was in the right, he thought there would be an exception. That's that. — Adam Levin

Yet this wasn't like sports, let alone sports movies. The roles weren't fixed, nor the meaning of the scaffolding. It didn't have to be this way. They might have, for instance, all felt stronger. They might have felt stronger and come together. They might have decided that, rather than now, as they'd been mistaken before: that if their enemies cheered the same damage as they, then they weren't their enemies after all. They might have concluded their interests were mutual, that some other force, earlier - some other enemy - had confused and divided them, and that all those who cheered were thus allies unmasked.
Instead they felt bitter, tricked by each other, last-strawed underdogs, suckers on the mend. Their enmity swelled and they fought even harder. — Adam Levin

You can render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, but if you don't keep from Caesar that which is yours, Caesar will take some, and than take some more, and if you don't put a stop to it, though you won't lose everything - you can't lose everything; there's things he can't take, at least one or two - a time will soon come when you'll think you've lost everything, when you'll think all is Caesar's, and by then you'll be too weak to take what's yours back, too tired to remember what was yours to begin with, and you'll end up, perversely, scheming for his leavings and, even more perversely, grateful when you get them. — Adam Levin

And your parents, believe me - I don't care what kind of relationship you've got with them - they'll take you up on that offer. You share that sandwich with them - are you hearing me? - you share that glory sandwich with them and they'll love you forever. — Adam Levin

T is good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether you do justice or not. — Adam Levin

And Desormie dragged the back of his hand back and forth across his mouth twice. And Brodsky coughed fakely to mask his laughter. And there was no more paste in the mouth-corners of Desormie. And Brodsky would not have to stare at paste while they talked in his office. That was nice of me.

I went to the gym. — Adam Levin

The fly was on my desk, his hose in the candy dust. I cupped my hand and covered him, then brushed him past the edge to see where he'd go. He returned to the dust, as if I hadn't just demonstrated that I could kill him, as if I hadn't just shown him right there in the dust. — Adam Levin

Without pain, there is no call for anger, much less rampaging. — Adam Levin

While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who'd hurt him, and it didn't matter that I hadn't wanted to hurt him or that I didn't know how I'd hurt him. It didn't matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn't need a name to be wrong. It didn't need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry. — Adam Levin

You fucked up,' he said. 'Know that you're someone who fucked up. But know that doesn't make you a fuckup. The difference is a matter of repetition — Adam Levin

Go ahead and flunk me for begging the question, then go ahead and fuck yourself for asking it. — Adam Levin

It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats. — Adam Levin

Why do we weep once we know that everything will be alright? We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we've seen can't be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth. — Adam Levin

Maholtz asked me, "Why do you hate me?"
I said, Everyone hates you.
"I know," he said. "I know that," he said, "but they hate me cause I scared them or had what they wanted. You weren't ever scarend of me. You never wanted what I had. Except for the sap. And then you took it, and now I don't have it, so why do you hate me?"
Maybe it's your accent.
"I'm from Pinttsburgh," he said.
Maybe you shouldn't be.
"I can't help where I'm from."
We turned at Main Hall. Feld was talking to Forrest Kenilworth and Cody. The chair sat dripping in front of the door.
So maybe it's your face. The way you look at girls like you're scheming to corner them.
"I was borng this way, though. I can't help how my face loonks."
So maybe it's all the banced thing that you say.
"They just come out of me. I'm hated, I feel it. I say those things without thinking, from hurnt. I can't help that either. It's not my faulnt."
I guess, then, I hate you for being so helpless. — Adam Levin

I might mention my belief that girls who like Woody Allen movies are nicer girls than girls who don't ... — Adam Levin

The point was to learn what it was we feared more: being misunderstood or being betrayed. — Adam Levin

Fuck them," says Susan Falls. This is the first time, in her entire life, that she has employed an extra-cerebral profanity. Though in fantasy she has often used swear words, she has never spoken one. It feels good, and it occurs to Susan that, as stupid as most people sound when they use profanities, as stupid as she must have sounded just now, the feeling of power that just rushed through her, from inner labia to thyroglossal duct, the trace sensations leftover from just now, just now when she said the word fuck, make sounding stupid more than worthwhile.
"Fuck them, then," Carla Ribisi agrees, and it is the hottest motherfucking thing Susan has ever heard. — Adam Levin

Gurion would lament: What is the good of trying to do justice if God will kill me and my family whether or not I do justice? — Adam Levin

Were there always to be more damage, damage would be an aspect of perfection. We would all be angels, one-legged and faceless, seething with endless, hopeless praise. Bless Adonai for making us better than angels. Blessed is Adonai for making us human. — Adam Levin

Reasonable of you, John. Reasonable of you, Dick. No two Israelites had ever pattered so goyischely. — Adam Levin

If I'd thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much - the prospect of screwing something up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you see. — Adam Levin

The goodness of our intentions was in direct correlation to the heights from which we condescended to each other. — Adam Levin

I feel like a millionaire on the back of an armored jet-ski my samurai girlfriend who loves me is charging at a cartel speedboat to win a game of chicken. Isn't this the day's best part? You don't even have to remember to enjoy it. It enjoys you into itself. — Adam Levin

He described the experience as being 'a little bit less fun, perhaps, than chain-smoking for ninety minutes while handcuffed to a dowager with asthma who used to teach Health and smells incontinent. — Adam Levin

Regarding vengeance and arch-enemies, one must not only be timely but prideful, and pride exacts propriety. — Adam Levin

Easy as a child breathes a wish at a dandelion ... is exactly how hard it would be for me to tear your limbs from their sockets. — Adam Levin

Underdog stories are easy to tell. It is best to be suspicious of underdog stories. — Adam Levin

If you know your mom is a great killer, and you think of your mom as a great killer, and you know she would kill for you, not just metaphorically, but really end lives for you, without hesitation, you don't want to make her sad and worried because how can you repay her for all the things she's willing to do? You can't. — Adam Levin