Tim Kreider Quotes & Sayings

Oh, yes. I've known kisses so narcotic they made my eyes roll back in my head. For a few weeks one winter I walked around feeling like I had a miniature sun in my heart. — Tim Kreider

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economy system. — Tim Kreider

Of course time doesn't stop for anyone; alcohol just keeps you from feeling it, the way it'll keep a man cozy while he freezes to death. — Tim Kreider

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: "For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox."1 A — Tim Kreider

What someone's lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of someone's self-image, their vanity and insecurities and most childish wishes, as we can infer from warped starlight the presence of a far vaster mass of dark matter. — Tim Kreider

We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we take out to treasure only rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: I'm happy. — Tim Kreider

It turns out that you can blow life off for as long as you want, but you still have to take the finals. — Tim Kreider

I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might be, after the initial shock of disillusionment, liberating. It might be a relief to quit maintaining the rigid pose of normalcy and own up to the outlaws and monsters we are. — Tim Kreider

The awkwardness of adolescence still clinging to them. — Tim Kreider

You can't feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever - or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living. — Tim Kreider

Introducing these people to our friends and family is, in a way, more heedlessly exhibitionistic than posting nude photos or sex tapes of ourselves online; it's like letting everyone watch our uncensored dreams. — Tim Kreider

It's not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it's something we collectively force one another to do. — Tim Kreider

The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There's only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other's guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they're both correct. — Tim Kreider

The smell of hospitals is like small talk at a funeral - you know its function is to cover up something else. — Tim Kreider

Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It's more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups - people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that's their intention but because it's impossible to avoid. — Tim Kreider

The problem is that most of us hated school. His fallacy was much the same as progressivism's: the assumption that if he could just explain the facts clearly, build a convincing enough argument, eventually everyone would come around to his conclusion. But people aren't interested in lectures; they want to hear stories. Which is why the right holds the demagogic advantage over the left in America; they tell a simpler, more satisfying story. — Tim Kreider

This is one reason people need to believe in God - because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us. — Tim Kreider

What I could relate to was the common fear that you are secretly so uniquely screwed-up that there is no way anyone would like you if they really knew you. — Tim Kreider

Jenny Boylan might be the one person in this world whom I now think of purely as a human being, free of all the corporeal baggage of chromosomes, hormones, and footwear. — Tim Kreider

At worst, we're considered selfish or immature; women who don't want to have children are regarded as unnatural, traitors to their sex, if not the species. — Tim Kreider

Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool's errand, is that happiness isn't a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It's the consequence of having lived in the way that we're supposed to - by which I don't mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it's also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the "real" stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past. — Tim Kreider

Often you don't know whether you're the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives. — Tim Kreider

The only people who seem to believe in the phenomenon of men and women just being good friends all seem to have good friends who are pining miserably after them, waiting for them to break up with their significant others. — Tim Kreider

During that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The horrible thing that I'd always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. — Tim Kreider

I'll see bald eagles swoop up from the water with wriggling little fish in their talons, and whenever they accidentally drop their catch, I like to imagine that fish trying to tell his friends about his own near-death experience, a perspective so unprecedented there are no words in the fish language to describe it: — Tim Kreider

Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people - if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are - you may have lost perspective. — Tim Kreider

Hadn't been able to avoid hearing about the Tea Party, a recrudescence of the far right sooner than I would've hoped. Depending on whom you ask, the Tea Party formed either as a spontaneous grassroots protest against the government's massive interventions in the economy after the financial collapse of 2008, an hysterical backlash against our first black president, or just a hasty rebranding of the Republican Party now that the name Republican had taken on the same stigma as the Pinto, DC-10, and other products that reliably self-destruct. Their platform was the usual Republican wish list - cut taxes, gut the government, repeal the last century and revoke the social contract - and happened to coincide with the financial interests of their billionaire backers. They were widely regarded, on the left,* as dingbats. But today I was going to resist the impulse to sneer and feel superior and instead try, for once, to listen. — Tim Kreider

It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. — Tim Kreider

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration - it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. — Tim Kreider

This kind of anarchic, Dionysian love doesn't give a shit about commitments or institutions; it smashes our illusions about what kind of people we are, what we would and would not do, exposing the difference between what we want to want and what we really want. We may choose friendships based on common interests and complimentary qualities, but our reasons for falling in love are altogether more irrational, projections of our most infantile wants and pathology. — Tim Kreider

When you're a child, your best friend in the world is the kid who lives next door. It doesn't occur to you then that this is a matter of arbitrary circumstance. When you grow up you like to imagine that your friendships have a more substantial basis - common interests, like-mindedness, some genuine affinity. It's always a sad revelation that when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that,for them, your friendships was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don't need you anymore. There's nothing especially cynical about this; people are drawn to each other because they're giving each other something they both need, and they drift apart when they aren't getting it or don't need it anymore. Friendship have natural life spans, like love affairs or favorite songs. — Tim Kreider

Defriending in't just unrecognized by some social oversight, it's protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn't just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. [...] Laura Kipnis's book Against Love: A Polemic includes a harrowing eight0page inventory of things people are not allowed to do because they're in romantic relationships, from going out without saying where you're going or when you'll be back to wearing that idiotic hat. But your best friend can move across the country without asking you. — Tim Kreider

At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we've never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They're turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there's still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own. — Tim Kreider

The real Machiavellian genius of the First Amendment is that free speech turns out to be mostly harmless - a lot of P.C. nit-picking, dingbat conspiracy theories, tedious libertarian screeds and name calling. The only "free speech" that has any effect in a stable, well-run plutocracy is the kind protected by Buckley vs. Valeo in the form of campaign contributions. — Tim Kreider

Grown-ups aren't supposed to talk about "best friends," but he was among my closest and certainly my most constant friend from then until we were well into our thirties, when he inexplicably disappeared on me. I don't mean he fled the country or changed his identity or got abducted; the last I heard he was still living in Baltimore. He just stopped returning my calls. It took me almost a year of leaving messages on his answering machine to get the hint. It took me much longer to understand that I was never going to know what had happened. — Tim Kreider

Society doesn't officially recognize friendship as an institution in the way it recognizes sexual relationships, so there's no real protocol for ending one. If you've been going out, dating, or just sleeping with someone for even a month or two an you want to stop seeing him, you're expected to have a conversation with him letting him know it and giving him some bogus explanation. This conversation is seldom pleasant, and it ranges in tone from brittle adult adult discussions in coffee shops to armed standoffs in day care centers, but once it's over, you at least know your status.

Because there's no formal etiquette for ending a friendship, most people do it in the laziest, most passive and painless way possible, by unilaterally dropping any effort to sustain it and letting the other person figure it out for themselves. — Tim Kreider

Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it's even more insidious than most vices because we don't even consciously acknowledge that it's a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it's a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation. And, — Tim Kreider

The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. — Tim Kreider

My feeling toward Republicans is like my feeling about sharks: of course they're stupid and vicious. It's in their nature to be mindless, ravening killing machines. It's nothing personal. They don't know any better. Pretty much the only thing you can do about them is stay out of their waters and, if you're unlucky enough to meet with one, shoot it through its rudimentary brain with a spear gun. — Tim Kreider

Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him — Tim Kreider

The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire. Officially, you owe each other nothing. — Tim Kreider

Our most important decisions in life are all profoundly irrational ones, made subconsciously for reasons we seldom own up to, which is why the worst ideas (getting married for the third time, having an affair with your wife's sister, secretly going off birth control as your marriage is collapsing) are the most impossible to talk anyone out of. — Tim Kreider

We want to be hurt, astonished, reminded we're alive. — Tim Kreider

I've demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound. — Tim Kreider

Defriending isn't just unrecognized by some social oversight; it's protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn't just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You — Tim Kreider

But then anytime you join in a mass movement you're going to find yourself standing alongside idiots. One reason people go to mass rallies is to become stupider and surer of themselves than they are when they're alone. — Tim Kreider

We are not infinitely malleable — Tim Kreider

Nietzsche wrote, "One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic". Or, as The Dude put it: "You're not wrong, Walter - you're just an asshole". Less quotable, and often overlooked, is Walter's response: "Okay, then." The Walters of the world don't mid being assholes; what matters to them is being right. — Tim Kreider

When somebody tells us something that would be disturbing or inconvenient for us to believe, we reflexively scrutinize that — Tim Kreider

(Regarding author Kim Stanley Robinson)
In an era filled with complacent dystopias and escapist apocalypses, Robinson is one of our best, bravest, most moral, and most hopeful storytellers. It's no coincidence that so many of his novels have as their set pieces long, punishing treks through unforgiving country with diminishing provisions, his characters exhausted and despondent but forcing themselves to slog on. What he's telling us over and over, like the voice of the Third Wind whispering when all seems lost, is that it's not too late, don't get scared, don't give up, we're almost there, we can do this, we just have to keep going. — Tim Kreider

If you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone. — Tim Kreider

Because there's no formal etiquette for ending a friendship, most people do it in the laziest, most passive and painless way possible, by unilaterally dropping any effort to sustain it and letting the other person figure it out for themselves. (I — Tim Kreider

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices (pursuing a creative career instead of making money; breastfeeding over formula; not having children in an overpopulated world) as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish and wrong. So it's easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity. — Tim Kreider

The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play. — Tim Kreider

I don't know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives. — Tim Kreider

Most of us liberals are so worried that we might secretly be racists that we're convinced this means we cannot really be racists.) — Tim Kreider

If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate. — Tim Kreider

So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have this same tone of thrilled vindication: these are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it. — Tim Kreider

She tends to think the sanest policy is a sort of spiritual triage, saving your efforts for those who are likely to make it with a little immediate aid - a small loan, a job recommendation, a couch to crash on for a week or two - and dispassionately ignoring the moribund. But what do you do if you don't have the option to walk away, to hang up or hit IGNORE, because you're bound to someone by obligation or love? What — Tim Kreider

The rise in voluntary childlessness, like the decrease in fertility and the increase in homosexuality, may be an evolutionary adaptation to overpopulation. Or, since the phenomenon is more prevalent in the West, maybe it's an effect of wealth and plenty. (Having more offspring is to an individual's evolutionary advantage in impoverished conditions, even though it's disastrous for the species as a whole and has made places like Rio and Calcutta some of the least desirable real estate in the solar system.) — Tim Kreider

Nobody loves newborns for who they are; they aren't anyone yet. — Tim Kreider

And I have to admit to myself that although I have plenty of sound reasons for not being a father - I know I would also be inconsistent and moody, alternately smothering and neglectful, plus I will never, ever be able to afford riding lessons or braces, let alone college - one of the reasons I don't want children is fear. I'm afraid that if I ever did have children of my own I would love them so painfully it would rip my soul in half, that I would never again have a waking moment free from the terror that something bad might ever happen to them. — Tim Kreider

It's always a sad revelation when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that, for them, your friendship was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don't need you anymore. There — Tim Kreider

They'd been impressed by facts about Skelly instead of by him. And knowing things about someone is not the same as knowing him. — Tim Kreider

Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master. — Tim Kreider

[...] as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation. — Tim Kreider

It's one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we're alive when we're reminded we're going to die, — Tim Kreider

Master whose every whim is law. (Note to friends with children: I am referring only — Tim Kreider

We mistakenly imagine we want 'happiness,' when we tend to picture in vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged quality of intensity. — Tim Kreider

It's easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing. — Tim Kreider

I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter. — Tim Kreider

The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment. — Tim Kreider

You'd think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there's something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they're immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck's sake defense. [...] As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, "An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness". — Tim Kreider

Life is too short to be busy. — Tim Kreider

At such times we are certainly not at our best but we are undeniably at our most human - utterly vulnerable, naked and laid open, a mess. Whenever — Tim Kreider

Because the end of a friendship isn't even formally acknowledged - no Little Talk, no papers served - you walk around effectively heartbroken but embarrassed to admit it, even to yourself. It's a special, open-ended kind of pain, like having a disease that doesn't even have a name. You worry you must be pathetically oversensitive to feel so wounded over such a thing. You can't tell people, "My friend broke up with me," without sounding like a nine-year-old. The only phrase I can think of that even recognizes this kind of hurt - "You look like you just lost your best friend" - is only ever spoken by adults to children. You can give yourself the same ineffectual lecture your parents used to give you as a kid: anyone who'd treat you this way isn't a very good friend and doesn't deserve your friendship anyway. But the nine-year-old in you knows that the reason they've ditched you is that you suck. — Tim Kreider

The trick, I suppose, is to find someone with a touch of the pathology you require, but not so much that it will destroy you. But, — Tim Kreider

We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country we want this to be: some of us would just like to live in Canada with better weather; others want something more like Iran with Jesus. — Tim Kreider

Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells. — Tim Kreider

I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone. — Tim Kreider

Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness. — Tim Kreider

(People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist most fiercely within themselves.) — Tim Kreider

Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex's office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn't this happen every day? — Tim Kreider

Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road. — Tim Kreider

It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day. — Tim Kreider

What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people. — Tim Kreider

Biblical, Talmudic, or Koranic literalists remind me of children wrinkling their noses at Belon oysters and asking for more Chef Boy-E-Dee. They want the world to be as simple as they are. — Tim Kreider

It turns out that when there is some conspicuous gap or contradiction at the center of someone's existence, there is probably a very specific, obvious reason for it, and the reason you're avoiding confronting it directly is that it's something you don't want to know. — Tim Kreider

Him a first edition of Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival and another who thinks I owe — Tim Kreider

His professed philosophy of "Shandyism" is a defiant frivolity that declines to take the world as seriously as it tries to insist upon. In — Tim Kreider

Because the essence of creativity is fucking around; art is that which is done for the hell of it. — Tim Kreider

One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding. — Tim Kreider

So it's tempting to read other people's lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people's lives, island universes, unknowable. Not — Tim Kreider

He made the rest of us look complacent, lazy, indulgent, and apathetic, in the same way that vegans' conscientious diets can't help but indict carnivores' as callous. The impulse is to write such people off as self-righteous and shrill (which, conveniently, they often are) so that you can stop thinking about slaughterhouses and keep eating scrapple. — Tim Kreider

This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are. — Tim Kreider

The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories. — Tim Kreider

Obviously, some part of us loves feeling 1) right and 2) wronged. But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it's even more insidious than most vices because we don't even consciously acknowledge it's a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it's a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation. — Tim Kreider

One of those nightmares where it's the final exam for a course — Tim Kreider

I hate all the boring in-between parts of life. — Tim Kreider

I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. — Tim Kreider