Nickolas Butler Quotes & Sayings

In all my travels, only in the Midwest would someone spend their money in a place they hate simply because they feel bad for the proprietors. Also I suppose, because they know your name. — Nickolas Butler

It was the first time in her life that she considered clothing as a method of camoflaging our scars, the traumas of our lives. — Nickolas Butler

I do not relish leaving home, leaving my children, leaving the familiarity of my bed, my coffee maker, my slippers, but I do love hotels. — Nickolas Butler

Someone possessed with hunger, with a thought, with a craving, with a perversion, someone who needs their drug, someone who comes to your door in the middle of the night--they won't have light in their eyes. And that's how you know. That's what I look for. I don't look at their mouths. People lie with their mouths. I look at their eyes. — Nickolas Butler

We think the world is steady, rolling through space beneath our feet, day and night, rain and sunlight. And then, one day, you just fall off the planet and drift away, into outer space, and everything you thought was true all the laws that bound your life before, all the rules and norms that kept things in place, that kept you in place, they're gone. And nothing makes sense anymore. Gravity is gone. Love is gone. — Nickolas Butler

as I watched their approach I wondered whether the slow pace of a wedding march was for the benefit of a bride on her most beautiful day, or for the aging father preparing to give her away. — Nickolas Butler

The world, it seems, does not much care anymore if you are an Eagle Scout, or even a Tenderfoot. It's all about how many "followers" you have, the perfection of your spray-tanned abs; whether you had the genius to sell a start-up company that hasn't produced a single viable product. — Nickolas Butler

The world is composed of people who are hungry, and those who are not hungry. It goes back to energy, to entropy. If you are hungry for food, you will be hungry for God, too. Or politics, or some kind of love. The people who are hungry have holes in them that can't be filled. Don't get me wrong. I've seen starving people at peace with the world. I've been in villages where starving people gave me their supper. Food doesn't have anything to do with it; it's about the deeper kind of hunger, those holes. — Nickolas Butler

America, I think, is about poor people playing music and poor people sharing food and poor people dancing, even when everything else in their life is so desperate, and so dismal that it doesn't seem there should be any room for any music, any extra food, or any extra energy for dancing. And people can say that I'm wrong, that we're a puritanical people, an evangelical people, a selfish people, but I don't believe that. I don't want to believe that. — Nickolas Butler

Here, I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn. — Nickolas Butler

The way he loved was almost like a vise, a weight; at times she felt it verged on codependence--that his identity, his value system, all of it very much hinged on her. — Nickolas Butler

Sometimes that is what forgiveness is anyway, a deep sigh — Nickolas Butler

The world is full of bad men, but if you are prepared, and if you are STRONG, then you cannot be taken off guard, and you will not be scared. And when they DO come to your door in the middle of the night and you are there to greet them with all the light there is inside you, all the strength, they are the ones who will run for the shadows. And I've SEEN it. — Nickolas Butler

Corn might be the epidemic that kills us, but I've always loved staring at a big field of it, perfectly planted. — Nickolas Butler

Buttery nipples," I said, smiling broadly. "Buttery nipples. — Nickolas Butler

It's all been worth it. Every fight, all those years of childish experimentation, the occasional heartbreak, the paltry checking account, the used, old trucks. To have lived with another human being, another person, this man, as long as I have, and to see him change and grow. To see him become more decent and more patient, stronger and more competent - to see how he loves our children - how he wrestles with them on the floor and kisses them unabashedly in public. To hear his voice in the evening, reading books to them, or explaining to them what his father was like while he was alive, or what I was like as a girl, a teenager, a young woman. To hear him explain why our part of the world is so special. — Nickolas Butler

No, the safest thing is to become an island. To make your house a citadel against all the garbage and ugliness in the world. How else can you be sure of anything? — Nickolas Butler

This is my home. This is the place that first believed in me. That still believes in me. — Nickolas Butler

First of all, I want you to think of the city as a collection of people. That's easy, right? You think of Minneapolis or Chicago or Milwaukee, you think of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people. That's what you think of right away. Maybe you think of sky-scrapers too, I don't know. But I think of people. The next thing you should think about is ideas. Think of each of those millions of people as a set of ideas. Like, That woman is a ballerina, she thinks about ballet. Or, that man is an architect, he thinks about buildings. If you begin thinking about it that way, a city is the greatest place in the world. It's millions of people, brushing up against one another, exchanging ideas, all the time, at every hour of the day. — Nickolas Butler

Goddamn golf shirts and gym memberships and fake muscles and tans and cell phones and new cars. Trevor didn't care about any of that garbage. All he wanted was a garden. Isn't that funny? — Nickolas Butler

Nothing patronizing, nothing sexist--just a slightly outdated politeness, and the general regard it might suggest. — Nickolas Butler

Winter in Wisconsin is the ideal time to avoid someone because our garments grow ever larger, ever thicker, and we go about the frozen world insulated beneath knit caps and mittens, our feet clad in mukluks or boots. — Nickolas Butler

He was righteous. He had a sense of duty, of what was right and wrong in the world, and I don't mean that in some evangelical sense of the word. And I don't mean that his world was just black and white. He just had a code, you know? He used to talk about that, about how few people had CODES anymore. It was his thing. He was always reading books about the samurai, about Japanese culture. — Nickolas Butler

I live here, I have chosen to live here, because life seems real to me here. — Nickolas Butler

When he talked politics, it was with me, or my sister, pointing a steady and patient finger at us, saying, "I don't care about left or right. It's all nonsense. All I ask of you is this: Be kind. Be decent. And don't be greedy. — Nickolas Butler