Quotes by Tim Kreider

“Often you dont know whether youre the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.”

“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 jus...”

“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...”

“The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. Theres only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each others guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on t...”

“This is one reason people need to believe in Godbecause we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.”

“I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone.”

“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 insid...”

“People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist more fiercely within themselves.”

“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'...”

“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 wildl...”

“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 nam...”

“We tend to make up [stories] in the same circumstances in which people come up with conspiracy theories: ignorance and powerlessness. And they share the same flawed premise as most conspiracy theor...”

“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 epheme...”

“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.”

“The truth is, people are ravenous for sex, sociopaths for love. I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might...”

“For all his secrecy and fear of being seen, he was touched that we had observed him so closely, and with such love. He loved that we knew him. This is one reason people need to believe in God -- be...”

“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 r...”

“I dont 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 ephemer...”

“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.”

“Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. Its more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, m...”