Nathan Hill Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 71 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Nathan Hill.
Famous Quotes By Nathan Hill
We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false. — Nathan Hill
The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There's a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything. — Nathan Hill
To most of the students, the education they received at school was only an incidental thing. To them, the overwhelming point of school was to learn how to behave in school. How to contort themselves to the school's rigid rules. Take, for example, bathroom breaks. No subject was more highly managed than the students' various excreta. — Nathan Hill
Sometimes we're so wrapped up in our own story that we don't see how we're supporting characters in someone else's. So — Nathan Hill
The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which — Nathan Hill
about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you're twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don't know what your small true part is until much later. — Nathan Hill
life, can become the truth of your life. He imagined them in Paris trying to talk to each other. She'd give small lectures on the country's innovative health care system; he'd give similar disquisitions on French jurisprudence. That would get them through one day, maybe two. Then they'd start making small talk about whatever was in front of them at that moment: the charming Parisian streets, the weather, the waiters, the daylight that clung on until well past ten. Museums would be a good choice because of the enforced silence. But then they'd be at a restaurant looking at menus and she'd say what looked good and he'd say what looked good and they'd stare at the plates of other diners and point out those that also looked good and express how they were perhaps changing their mind about what they intended to — Nathan Hill
In case you haven't noticed, the word has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it's way easier to ignore all the data that doesn't fit your preconceptions and what you believe, and we'll agree to disagree. — Nathan Hill
The nurses in Willow Glen didn't try to prevent death. But they did try to guide you to die in the right way. Because if you died from something you weren't supposed to die from, families became suspicious. — Nathan Hill
That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty - because the movement required it of you - and loving something you actually loved. Love - real, genuine, unasked-for love - made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies. — Nathan Hill
It's no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it's sanctimony. — Nathan Hill
Listen, Samuel, really, voice of experience here? It's a terrible burden, being idealistic. It discolors everything you'll do later. It will haunt you constantly for all time as you become the inevitably cynical person the world requires you to be. Just give up on it now, the idealism, doing the right thing. Then you'll have nothing to regret later." "Thanks. I'll be in touch. — Nathan Hill
Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn't want to work too hard. Because his — Nathan Hill
They were coming back to his mother's neighborhood now, the eastern boundary of which was a bridge spanning a know of train tracks that cut through the city like a zipper. — Nathan Hill
Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal. — Nathan Hill
People love each other for many reasons, not all of them good," she said. "They love each other because it's easy. Or because they're used to it. Or because they've given up. Or because they're scared. People can be a Nix for each other. — Nathan Hill
The Nix, she said, was a spirit of the water who flew up and down the coastline looking for children, especially adventurous children out walking alone. When it found one, the Nix would appear to the child as a large white horse. Unsaddled, but friendly and tame. It bowed down as low as a horse was able, so the kid could leap onto it. At — Nathan Hill
to order and that whole inner debate one usually has when ordering food at a restaurant would be vocalized and performed for the express purpose of filling space, of jamming the silence so full of meaningless idle chitchat that they'd never get around to talking about the thing they never talked about but were always thinking: that if they had been born into a generation that found divorce more acceptable, they would have left each other so long ago. For decades they had avoided this subject. It was like they'd come to an agreement - they were who they were, they were born when they were born, they were taught that divorce was wrong, and they openly disapproved of other couples, younger couples, who divorced, while secretly feeling bolts of envy at these couples' ability to split and remarry and become happy again. — Nathan Hill
Perhaps, sir, for our purposes, sir, you shouldn't think of it as your mother abandoned you. Instead, perhaps think of it as she gave you up for adoption slightly later than usual. — Nathan Hill
There is no place less communal in America - no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice - than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago. — Nathan Hill
that you didn't know what to do except smash your face into hers, back when kissing was not a signpost along the way but rather the destination itself. — Nathan Hill
He swears. He promises. One of these days will be the day that changes everything. — Nathan Hill
It was true. Heard it on Cronkite. — Nathan Hill
In America, the government is accountable to the people, not the other way around," says a constitutional law scholar sympathetic to the antiwar movement on the subject of the anonymous police. — Nathan Hill
What's true? What's false? In case you haven't noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it's way easier to ignore all data that doesn't fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we'll agree to disagree. It's liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It's very hip right now. — Nathan Hill
It is remarkable how quickly extraordinary things turn ordinary. — Nathan Hill
A taxi. The driver vaults out and screams "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" pointing at Samuel as if to specially emphasize that it is him - and no one else - who needs to be fucked. — Nathan Hill
Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It's narcissistic. It's best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school. — Nathan Hill
Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime. — Nathan Hill
You never even decided that your life would be this way. It's simply the way it's become. You've been carved out by the things that have happened to you like how the canyon can't tell the river which way to shape it. It just allows it to be cut. — Nathan Hill
When he told Faye about the Nix, he said the moral was: Don't trust things that are too good to be true. But then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: "The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst." Samuel — Nathan Hill
The only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That's the new authenticity. — Nathan Hill
What do you do when you discover your adult life is a sham? — Nathan Hill
There is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure. — Nathan Hill
if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life. — Nathan Hill
He's like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn't get what he wanted. — Nathan Hill
This is what you get in the suburbs, his mother said, the satisfaction of small desires. The — Nathan Hill
It's the great flaw of journalism. The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is. — Nathan Hill
What you call conflict of interest, I call synergy. — Nathan Hill
Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies. Still, — Nathan Hill
He longs for someone in the crowd to see the haunted expression he's sure is playing all over his face right now and come up to him and say, You seem to be experiencing overwhelming pain, how can I help you? — Nathan Hill
Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If — Nathan Hill
Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can't order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform. — Nathan Hill
Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That's it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things. — Nathan Hill
He's looking for people he can be himself around. Aren't we all? — Nathan Hill
Because one thing she's learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new; it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid; — Nathan Hill
It's all arbitrary. Had Faye attended a different school. Had her parents moved away. Had Peggy been sick that day. Had she chosen a different boy. And on and on. A thousand permutations, a million possibilities, and almost all of them kept Faye from sitting here in the sand with Henry. — Nathan Hill
You have to be careful," Pwnage said, "with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone's a puzzle until you realize they're a trap. But by then it's too late. That's the trap. — Nathan Hill
But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel's written his book, the more he's realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone's life, you will find something familiar. — Nathan Hill
The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them. — Nathan Hill
The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst. — Nathan Hill
A dormitory was a hopeless idea. Whoever thought of encasing two hundred girls in a concrete box? — Nathan Hill
It's no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise. — Nathan Hill
Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it's his job to prevent this closure. — Nathan Hill
And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane. — Nathan Hill
What a treacherous thing a body was, how it so blatantly acted out the mind's secrets. — Nathan Hill
Of course, eating these food items is not what I might describe as pleasant, since they're tough and scorched and moistureless from their all-day cooking on high-temperature rollers. Sometimes biting through a burrito's thick tortilla casing can feel like chewing through your own toe calluses." "That's an image that's going to linger. — Nathan Hill
In class, Laura almost always stares into her lap, where she hides her phone. She thinks if the phone is in her lap she has effectively concealed it. She has no idea how obvious and transparent this maneuver is. Samuel has not asked her to stop checking her phone in class, mostly so he can savage her grade at the end of the semester when he doles out "participation points. — Nathan Hill
She has never before given herself over to anyone-she'd always parceled herself out little by little. This bit for Samuel, some small part for her father, barely anything for Henry. She'd never put all of herself in just one place. It felt too risky. Because her great and constant fear all these years was that if anyone ever came to know all of her--the real her, the true deep essential Faye--they would not find enough stuff there to love. Hers was not a soul large enough to nourish another. — Nathan Hill
the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps. — Nathan Hill
Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For — Nathan Hill
Beyond everything else, she loves this: how swiftly things can strike her - music, people, life - how quickly they can surprise her, all of a sudden, like a punch. — Nathan Hill
Coming home at the end of a long day to someone who's glad you're back, is the feeling that keeps him logging on and playing upward of forty hours a week in preparation for a raid like this, when he gathers with his anonymous online friends and together they go kill something big and deadly. — Nathan Hill
there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, — Nathan Hill
Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them. — Nathan Hill
In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what's usually ignored is the fact that each man's description was correct. What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn't that they were blind - it's that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp. — Nathan Hill
It was an unspoken fact that she could leave at any moment with very little pain, whereas he would be devastated. A puddle of rejection. Because he knew nothing like this would ever happen to him again for the rest of his life. He would never again find a woman like Alice, and after she was gone he would return to the life she had revealed to be tedious and barren. — Nathan Hill