Quotes by Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“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. Officiall...”

“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 wo...”

“What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.”

“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.”

“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 bu...”

“The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play.”

“At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things weve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. Theyre turning their lives into stories,...”

“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 ...”

“Its easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing.”

“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 c...”

“I'm not issuing some nave plea for civility or bipartisanship here, or pretending that the opposing sides in this fight are intellectually equal. We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of count...”