Quotes from The Nix

“Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.”
― quote from The Nix

“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”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life.”
― quote from The Nix

“Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.”
― quote from The Nix

“It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”
― quote from The Nix

“Think about it. Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer—and we’ve done a million studies on this—is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat. “But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. How do you escape?” “You buy a new chip.” “You buy a missile-shaped chip! That’s the answer. What this ad does is admit something you already deeply suspect and existentially fear: that consumerism is a failure and you will never find any meaning there no matter how much money you spend. So the great challenge for people like me is to convince people like you that the problem is not systemic. It’s not that snacks leave you feeling empty, it’s that you haven’t found the right snack yet. It’s not that TV turns out to be a poor substitute for human connection, it’s that you haven’t found the right show yet. It’s not that politics are hopelessly bankrupt, it’s that you haven’t found the right politician yet. And this ad just comes right out and says it. I swear to god it’s like playing poker against someone who’s showing his cards and yet still bluffing by force of personality.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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”
― quote from The Nix

“Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.”
― quote from The Nix

“She’d decided that 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.”
― quote from The Nix

“Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If”
― quote from The Nix

“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. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.”
― quote from The Nix

“He’s like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn’t get what he wanted.”
― quote from The Nix

“How easily a simple façade can become your life, can become the truth of your life.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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. Faye,”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“Eventually, all debts must be repaid.”
― quote from The Nix

“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.”
― quote from The Nix

“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?”
― quote from The Nix

Popular quotes

“To reason with governments, as they have existed for ages, is to argue with brutes. It is only from the nations themselves that reforms can be expected.”
― Thomas Paine, quote from Rights of Man

“No, Michael, I do not trust you on a boat, I do not trust you on a goat. I do not trust you here. I do not trust you there. I do not trust you anywhere.”
― James St. James, quote from Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland

“Eric came to Macy's? Did he burst into flames the moment he passed the first cash register?”
― MaryJanice Davidson, quote from Undead and Unemployed

“There are so many impatient people in the world. It seems everyone wants something right this second. We don't want to wait in lines, we get fidgety when our food takes too long to cook, and we have no tolerance whatsoever for anyone who holds us up from doing anything we want to do the moment we want to do it. I'm bothered right now that I'm having to wait till the end of this sentence to see what word I end up on. On, who knew? It's particularly hard to wait for things that are days or weeks or even months away. Calendars mock you, clocks pester you, and the rotation of the earth seems to slow by at least forty percent. I suppose, however, that if you were preparing to take over the world and you needed one final piece to fall into place, but that piece had to be slowly dragged over the dirt so it didn't die, that would be really hard to wait for. I'd feel sorry for whoever that happened to, but then again they were trying to take over the world and all.
So please, no sympathy for Azure.”
― Obert Skye, quote from Leven Thumps and the Wrath of Ezra

“What could I do? I was beyond pissed off. Trevor not telling anyone about us was always a big issue between us. I understood his reasons and never pushed it. But when he made fun of guys who had the balls to come out of the closet? That was a line he shouldn’t’ve crossed. I hated he’d done it in front of me.” Edgard shoved a hand through his hair. “After dinner, the whole family loaded up and went to the big rodeo dance. I declined.

“I burned my bootheels getting to the g*y cowboy bar in Denver and hooked up with a dentist who was in town for the rodeo. I spent the night in his hotel room and didn’t see Trevor until the following afternoon when we had to compete.”

Chassie figured she wouldn’t much care for Trevor’s jealous reaction, but she wouldn’t be surprised by it.

“We sucked in the arena. Lost our chance for points or purse. Soon as we were alone he lit into me. We fought. Not with words. With our fists. We beat the shit out of each other, Chass. It was ugly.”

“Where’d it happen? Since you were always so discreet?”

“In the living quarters of the horse trailer. Trev said something. I said something back. He took the first punch. I landed the last. Christ, we were rolling around on the floor, bleeding—”

“Whoa—bleeding?”

Edgard closed his eyes. “When we were shoving each other some beer bottles got broken and we just kept going, stomping all over them. Trevor slipped and fell and I didn’t help him up, I just kept beating on him. So he has a cut on his back and I have a gash on my arm as a memento.”
― Lorelei James, quote from Rough, Raw, and Ready

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