Quotes by Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“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.”

“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...”

“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...”

“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...”

“Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his exs office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every othe...”

“Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn't an obtainable goal in itself but only an arte...”

“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 exp...”

“What someones 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. ...”