Nathan Monk > Quotes

“This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“It takes a particular level of talent to be as profoundly bad at sports as I am.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“But life really comes down to the two major types of folks: those who do and those who say they will but never do.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Instead, they were surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest, and if a gunshot goes off in the woods and no Karen is there to ask the local neighborhood association Facebook group if that was gunshots or a firework, did a gunshot really go off?”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“Caspian hadn’t even spent too much time thinking about the world of trouble he would be in back at home, that he was likely excommunicated. That he had let his friend down, or that, in reality, the bishop had let him down first.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“What Trump was too stupid to see, that any of us could have warned him, is that when you’ve got a generation of people who were raised being told the world belonged to them, you were just a means to an end. Millennials knew all too well that our parents used us as little remote controls and to fill the gas because they were too afraid to get their hands dirty. They didn’t just want Trump because he spoke like them and gave them permission to be their most vile selves in public; they wanted someone to do their dirty work for them.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Watching as our friends went to go fight an invisible enemy called terrorism. Our friends dying outside of oil fields protecting special interests. None of it made sense. Just a few years ago, we were all suspects, potential school shooters, having to go through metal detectors to make sure we weren’t armed and then straight out of high school they handed all our friends guns and sent them halfway across the world to die in order to get gas prices back down below two dollars.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Every day we see injustices happen all around us that could be resolved by breaking a rule and we collectively do nothing. Wars rage and famines starve, children are slaughtered, and we remain silent. We fear consequences or the crosshairs moving away from the oppressed and toward us, so we let terror win and choke out our voice. Then, when someone does stand up and say, “These rules are fucked,” we bury them in the back of the graveyard of history and then name a road after them. We know that rules aren’t meant to be broken and that there will be harsh consequences when we do break them. So we say, “Rules are meant to be broken,” as we steal two coins from the take-a-penny cup at the convenience store and place them on the eyes of a dead kindergartner. God bless America.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“There was not a single bit of pretense or bullshit in any action that he took, except that promise that he would pay for the drinks.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Yes, the tsar needed to be removed and make way for freedom for all people, but not like this. What happened to those children was a warning of what was to come at the hands of our new leaders. The Soviets gave us another kind of tyranny. We traded one type of oppression for another.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“Even in times of war,” Caspian said, “we attend to the wounded on both sides. Otherwise, are we any different than them? He is God’s to judge now.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“we would be bringing their grandkids into what felt like a third-world America.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“I thought you said you were staying out of it.” Caspian looked suspicious. “How would you know that?” “I said I was staying out of it, not that I was an idiot who wouldn’t know where his enemy lies.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“With his misinformation campaigns, he has bolstered a false kind of patriotism on the right and so weakened any love for country on the left that both are willingly handing the nation over into the hands of Tsar Putin, one by way of a fake news war paint known as nationalism and the other by defeatism.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“Even after their falling out, Shane never stopped truly caring for Nick, even if he couldn’t stand looking at him for more than a few seconds. It was the kind of heartbreak that people assume is exclusive to romantic love. After watching their breakup, I’m not sure there is really much of a difference between lovers or friends going their separate ways. They shared every bit as much intimacy, if not more, as lovers minus the physical consummation.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“I should have told him that protesting was also very American. That expressing freedom of speech was American. That disagreeing with your government was truly American. That wanting people not to starve was American.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Each morning waking up and wondering, “Is this the too far? Is this the moment everything changes?” and then ordering another crunch wrap supreme.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Some things just are, you know. It doesn’t all have to fit in a pretty little box or on a calendar. I mean I didn’t ask to be like this. I didn’t ask for this to be what happened. I didn’t mean to love you both. I didn’t want to be complicated, you know! I mean, fuck, why would I want to be complicated? I just know that I love you and I love her and I love us together. I don’t know how else to explain that.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Other struggling people aren't the enemy.”
― Nathan Monk

“We have to do the right thing, even if we aren’t heard, even if the ship still sinks, even if it means we lose it all in the process.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“Titanic had just been released that winter and we all went to see it a million times. Something about it captured our spirit of love and adventure like no other movie had. I don’t know what it was exactly, but we just couldn’t get enough. We were a bunch of teenagers walking around breaking our own hearts over and over again. It was perfect and beautiful.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Learn to love it, child. Don’t despise it because these white nationalists, these terrorists, have coopted it. Patriotism and nationalism are not the same evil.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“We now stand at the very edge of exchanging our republic for a theocracy, replacing our president of the people with a new king: a tsar. Do we have a republic? A monarchy? A theocracy? Have we appointed a new tsar and replaced our Congress with a Duma? No, we have a republic if we can keep it.”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“We wanted to die but were too afraid we would survive it and be stuck with the medical bills.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“My father liked to constantly remind me that he put himself through college, purchased his first house and a car for $500 with his weekend job. The way I figured it, by rate of inflation and hours worked, I should have been able to afford a mansion and a yacht by now. Somehow, the math wasn’t working out like that. Maybe I was under my desk the day they taught that in school.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“I thought that it was supposed to bring you happiness and fulfillment. But with each step up the stairway to heaven, Nick stopped loving, stopped smiling, and stopped laughing. I guess he had reached the final stage of process: he was the bishop. Now he had perfected these gifts inside himself he would be able to teach others to stop loving, stop smiling, and stop laughing.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“It seemed that just around the time that everything started to feel normal again, here came the AV nerds running down the hallways again. Senior year began with the towers falling. It was all too much. It felt like the world was falling apart and we were just collateral damage in some game grown-ups were playing. A war began and it seemed like half the guys from my graduating class joined the military. They drove around in trucks with “Infidel” written in white letters across their windows. We now had an enemy at home and an enemy abroad. If you were different, if you didn’t look like Leave it to Beaver, you were a suspect. The Muslim kids and the Black kids and the queer kids and the alternative kids; we were a walking perp line.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“Actually, I don’t understand,” Caspian said. “How could you understand?” she snapped back at him. “But honestly, why should your understanding matter? Do you have to sympathize with everything in order for you to care about it? You have to have experienced the thing for someone to be considered equal to you? Empathy isn’t a fucking thing they teach in seminary?”
― Nathan Monk, Russian Sleeper Cell

“It just becomes easier never to address our collective and universal sin when you can point your fingers southward and say, “Look at those backwoods rednecks” while your knee is on the throat of a Black man in Minneapolis.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge

“We were just a bunch of scared and overly zealous kids grasping for a future we had all been promised, only to find out when we got there it had been reverse mortgaged so our spawners could go on cruises and never retire, just for fun. We did everything we were told to do. “Go to college so you don’t flip burgers!” our parents would say in liturgical unison. And all the politicians said, “Amen!” with raging boners over the interest we would be paying until the day we died of a preventable ailment. In the beginning, we never even questioned why we disparaged the culinary artists who prepared our meals, nor did we anticipate that we would all soon be fighting on the same battlefield together begging for table scraps. Comrades in arms of a war we didn’t even start. We were casualties of a massive game of Craps our parents were playing with the economy, betting their odds against our planet, our gains, our jobs, our education, our healthcare, our future. We were bitter millennials long before they even told us we had a title.”
― Nathan Monk, All Saints Hotel and Cocktail Lounge