Best 30 quotes of Nathan Hill on MyQuotes

And do you want to marry him?" "Maybe. I don't know." "That kind of indifference usually means no." "It's not indifference. I just haven't made up my mind." "Either you want to marry him more than anything in the world, or you say no. It's very simple." "It's not simple," Faye said. "Not at all. You don't understand." "So explain it to me." "Okay, here's what it's like. Imagine you're feeling desperately thirsty. Like insanely thirsty. All you can think about is a big tall glass of water. Got it?" "Got it." "And you fantasize about this big tall glass of water, and the fantasy is really vivid in your head, but it does not actually quench your thirst." "Because you can't drink the imaginary glass of water." "Right. So you look around and see this murky, oily puddle of water and mud. It's not exactly the tall glass of water but it does have the advantage of being wet. It's real, whereas the tall glass of water is not. And so you choose the oily mud puddle, even though it's not really what you'd prefer.

And now Frank Andresen finally speaks, and when he does there is just nothing in his voice, no emotion, no feeling. He’s dislodged himself from the moment.

And that old story about the ghost that looks like a rock comes to her now: The farther from shore you take it, the heavier it becomes, until one day it gets too heavy to bear. Faye imagines her father taking a small piece of earth with him, a memento: this farm, this family, his memory of it. This was the drowning stone from his stories. He took it to sea and took it to Iceland and took it all the way to America. And as long as he held on to it, he just kept sinking.

a trauma that breaks you into brand new pieces.

But it seems to Samuel that all the school is preparing them for is to sit quietly and fake that they're working. To feign the appearance of concentration when in fact they're checking sports scores or e-mail or watching videos or spacing out. 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 a your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.

But such was the way with people – they loved the things that made them miserable.

Don't break character!' she scolded.

Everyone loves a prodigy [...]. Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we're not special because we weren't born with it, which is a great excuse.

He’s looking for people he can be himself around. Aren’t we all?

If you keep pestering the politician, you look like a pest, and America does not tune in to watch pests. It's a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear.

It’s because a lighthouse is two-faced, and this is how she feels each time she visits. A lighthouse is both an invitation and a warning. A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger.

It's the great flax of journalism: The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is. We have follow the same trajectory as the stock market---sustained and unstoppable growth.

It was true. Heard it on Cronkite.

Maybe desire was best left unspoken.

Nobody knows the words to use today. They are committed only to their individual furies.

Our bodies are the thin knife's edge separating us from oblivion.

Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

The news displays a map of Grant Park on a massive touch-screen television in what has become a commonplace of modern newscasting: someone on television communicating via another television, standing in front of the television and controlling the screen by pinching it with his hands and zooming in and out in super-high definition. It all looks really cool.

The only people who get famous on their own are serial killers. Everyone else needs people like me.

The protest movement,” he says. “The more the cops beat us up, the more our argument seems correct.” He leans back into the pew and stares blankly forward. “It’s actually pretty brilliant. The protestors and the police, the progressives and the authoritarians—they require each other, they create each other, because they need an opponent to demonize. The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.

There are some mysteries of the universe that ought to remain mysteries.

These are the questions you ask when you're cracking up. When you suddenly recognize that not only are you living a life you never intended to lead but also you are feeling assaulted and punished by the life you have. You begin searching for those early wrong turns. What moment led you into the maze?

They’re in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We’re talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic—horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that’s worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical.” “Okay. So?” “So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn’t change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine.” The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades “back into a kind of ominous tolling. “Melancholy,” Periwinkle says, “had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it’s not patriotism. It’s evolution.

They turned on the television and saw some news story about another goddamn humanitarian crisis, another goddamn civil war in some godforsaken place, and saw images of wounded people or starving children and felt a bright, bitter anger at the children for invading and ruining the only moments of relaxation and "me time" the neighbors had all day. The neighbors would get a little indignant here, about how their own lives were hard too, and yet nobody heard them complaining about it. everyone had problems - why couldn't they just quietly deal with them? On their own? With a bit of self-respect? Why did they have to get everyone else involved? It's not like the neighbors could do anything. It's not like civil wars were their fault.

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.

This was an Introduction to Literature course, but she cared less about literature than she did about points. It wasn’t the topic of the course that mattered to her; what mattered was the currency.

When all you have is the memory of a thing, all you can think about is how the thing is gone.

When he wasn’t around it was like he didn’t exist for her, which was painful because he thought about her almost all the time.

Years later, in a high-school biology class, Samuel heard a story about a certain kind of African turtle that swam across the ocean to lay its eggs in South America. Scientists could find no reason for the enormous trip. Why did the turtles do it? The leading theory was that they began doing eons ago, when South America and Africa were still locked together. Back then, only a river might have separated the continents, and the turtles laid their eggs on the river's far bank. But then the continents began drifting apart, and the river widened by about an inch per year, which would have been invisible to the turtles. So they kept going to the same spot, the far bank of the river, each generation swimming a tiny bit farther than the last one, and after a hundred million years of this, the river had become an ocean, and yet the turtles never noticed. This, Samuel decided, was the manner of his mother's departure. This was how she moved away - imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit.

You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I'm talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says 'I'm just being real,' what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. the only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That's the new authenticity. Molly Miler can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along.