Stephen Tobolowsky > Quotes

“Fairly or unfairly, many people are tried in life. The mistake people make is that they think the trial is a sign of failure. It’s not. It’s only a doorway that leads to who you really are.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“The fall from your dream into reality is especially hard when you’ve seen that you can fly.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“The one common tragedy I have seen woven throughout my life and the lives of others is that we can't feel the miracle of our own lives.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“Relationships never operate at the level of your greatest strengths. They operate at the level of your greatest weakness. Whoever is unfaithful, whoever is more needy, whoever is late, controls the nature of the friendship. You can swing with it or not, but you can’t count on changing it.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“I knew I should have taken the high road. I was just going too fast and missed my exit.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“malachim, or messengers. Christianity has defined these messengers as what we know as angels. The more ancient interpretation in Judaism is that the malachim could be anything. They could be heavenly spirits. Or not. They could come in the form of ordinary people, donkeys, a flame, or even a breeze.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“When you fail is when you need to celebrate.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky

“Knowledge is the ultimate protection against the dark.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Any endeavor has unintended consequences. Any ill-conceived endeavor has more.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“The glue that holds a person together is either values or vanity. It is always detectable when we least expect it.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“Almost everyone I’ve ever met likes to hear a story from the beginning. It’s a curious prejudice, when you think about it. In life, we almost never know the beginning of a story. We are always coming in somewhere in the middle.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“sun. And I was afraid. I was afraid that not all prayers are answered, or that maybe they are, but not in the ways we expect or in a language we understand.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“Faith is the direct product of doubt. It is the bridge between what we have and what we want. Contrary to popular misconception, people who are religious doubt everything. Doubt is chronicled continuously in the Bible. From Abraham and Isaac, to Moses at the burning bush, to Jesus on the cross asking, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” All are narratives of doubt. Just as with Feynman’s physics, doubt propels the Bible. Doubt, not certainty, feeds imagination. I remain hopeful that someday I will be able to answer the first question I wanted to ask God when my mother told me a bedtime story: If we weren’t supposed to eat from the tree of knowledge, why was there an apple in the Garden of Eden?”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Being on Heroes was like being in one of those comedies where the leading man wakes up hungover with a woman in his bed and a walrus in his bathtub and he shakes his head and says, “What happened?”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“I admit that it has been hard to know God. I have had bouts of uncertainty. Being an actor, I have become accustomed to the condition. I have learned that doubt is like a bad hangover. It’s unpleasant, but it’s proof that you’re still alive.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“The victims remain in the most unlikely places—in the hearts and minds of strangers who can’t escape their silence. I believe in ghosts. I believe they continue to walk the earth hoping to heard. To that end, I will continue to walk, hoping to hear.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Because relationships are so difficult to make and keep, people always try to simplify them, codify them, and crystallize them into something understandable.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“a beat-up red van pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway right in front of us. The side door slid open. Beth and I jumped inside the van and slammed the door shut. The van was full of black people. A man and woman were in the front seat. We were in the back with an old woman and two small children. I said, “Hey.” There was no response. I continued, “I hope you’re heading for Dallas. That’s where we were heading. Thanks for stopping.” The man driving didn’t say a word. He just looked at me in the rearview mirror. He started the engine. I repeated, “You are going to Dallas, aren’t you?” He just looked at me again in the rearview, put the car into gear, and off we went. I watched the bus get smaller and smaller out the back window and I thought how clever we were. I started talking to the people in the back of the van. The old woman put her hand on one of the children to quiet any urge to speak. Silence. No one looked at Beth or me. It was tense. Now I wondered how this ride would end. Around sundown, the van pulled off the road in the outskirts of Dallas. The man driving said, “We’re not going any farther. You have to get out here.” I nodded and opened the van door. “Hey, thanks for the lift,” I said. “I was afraid no one would pick up hitchhikers anymore.” “What? You were hitchhiking? We never even saw you. We had just pulled over to change drivers. You jumped into the car and said, ‘Drive us to Dallas.’ We thought you were kidnappers.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“Like any good father, I tried to calculate ways I could monetize this ability.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“Debauchery requires maintenance.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“…I saw that she, that we, had been wrong my entire life. Self-preservation is not the primary instinct. It never was. […] People don’t seek survival. Even if they do, it’s more like an afterthought, like trying to remember to turn into the skid, which is important, but it’s not the primary instinct. The real primary instinct is transcendence. More than safety, more than happiness, we are driven to reach beyond ourselves, even if it means our own destruction.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“In the void, we will hang our affections almost anywhere.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“On April 11, 2011, Oriel FeldmanHall of Cambridge University ran an experiment as to how people would react when they had to inflict pain on someone else. People were told they would get paid if they administered electric shocks to people in another room. It was the Milgram experiment with a twist. The people getting shocked would be televised. The greater the shock the person in the booth delivered, the more money he or she would get. Sixty-four percent said they would never deliver a shock, even a mild shock. But when the doctor pulled out the money, 96 percent of the participants jumped in and tried to get as much cash as they could. The more visible the victim was on the television monitor, the perpetrator delivered less of a shock. But when only the victim’s hand or foot was being shown on camera, empathy vanished. Maybe evil is the inability to see the human face.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“I actually had misunderstood her name the entire time I knew her. Instead of Alice Nell I thought her mother was calling her Alice Snail. I loved snails. I ran over to her house with the mimosa flowers. I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I kissed her on the cheek. I still remember how warm and soft that cheek was. I knew from the movies that kissing a girl would be an important skill for me to learn. At night I would practice on my pillow. It didn’t feel anything like Alice Snail’s cheek. I needed to move up to something more girl-like. I switched to the stuffed rabbit I had in my bed. It was missing an eye and an ear. But it did have a mouth of sorts so it was a step up from the pillow.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“Maybe Joseph [in the Old Testament] . . . was describing the journey itself . . . don't fight with the path.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“The force that held us together for so many years was something that resembled devotion. Devotion is affection mixed with faith. It’s a substance more durable than reason.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, My Adventures with God

“Mom was the epitome of wackiness in a good-hearted way.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“I remember my first marriage proposal. I was five.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“Sometimes everything you know is wrong.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club

“In our lives, memory rarely serves as a measurement of time, but rather as a measurement of meaning. The associations we make are rarely linear. Time and memory combine to create an unpredictable picture. We never can know what moments will rise to the level of significance. The strangest, smallest things can become your evening star.”
― Stephen Tobolowsky, The Dangerous Animals Club