Nathan Hill > Quotes

“When Samuel was a child reading a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, he’d keep a bookmark at the spot of a very hard decision, so that if the story turned out poorly, he could go back and try again. More than anything he wants life to behave this way.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“And I told you to bring nine toys," she said. "You brought eight. Next time try to pay more attention." And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn't talk, and thus he couldn't tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“And do you want to marry him?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
"That kind of indifference usually means no."
"It's not indifference. I just haven't made up my mind."
"Either you want to marry him more than anything in the world, or you say no. It's very simple."
"It's not simple," Faye said. "Not at all. You don't understand."
"So explain it to me."
"Okay, here's what it's like. Imagine you're feeling desperately thirsty. Like insanely thirsty. All you can think about is a big tall glass of water. Got it?"
"Got it."
"And you fantasize about this big tall glass of water, and the fantasy is really vivid in your head, but it does not actually quench your thirst."
"Because you can't drink the imaginary glass of water."
"Right. So you look around and see this murky, oily puddle of water and mud. It's not exactly the tall glass of water but it does have the advantage of being wet. It's real, whereas the tall glass of water is not. And so you choose the oily mud puddle, even though it's not really what you'd prefer.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Pwnage once told Samuel that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps. And for both Samuel and Faye, circa summer 2011, people were definitely enemies. Mostly what they wanted out of life was to be left alone. But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn't that they were blind - it's that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp. ... Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Sometime we're so wrapped up in our own story that we don't see how we're supporting characters in someone else's.”
― Nathan Hill

“Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn't want to work too hard.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“It's no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise.”
― Nathan Hill

“Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them. So he says, ‘Yes I believe you,’ and she smiles. She stretches. She touches his face, and makes it splendid.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new; it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid;”
― Nathan Hill

“Our bodies are the thin knife's edge separating us from oblivion.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Mostly what they wanted out of life was to be left alone. But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel's written his book, the more he's realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone's life, you will find something familiar. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“It's an altogether manic and ceaseless conversation, a conversation that feels sometimes like falling down stairs, barely keeping upright, taken by gravity, skipping, grasping, and then somehow landing, magically on one's feet, intact and triumphant.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Did you know,” she said, “that the first explorers who came to Kansas thought it was a big wasteland? They actually called it a desert, The Great American Desert, you know why?” “No.” “It was the lack of trees. They thought if trees couldn't live here, nothing could, so they misunderstood the whole place—which is basically what mom does. […] Those explorers,” Evelyn said, “were looking for the one thing that didn't grow, and so they didn't notice all the things that did grow. It's an important lesson: if you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what's really there.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“If you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone's life, you will find something familiar.”
― Nathan Hill

“...certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain or you could choose to be alive.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“They’re in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We’re talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic—horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that’s worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical.”

“Okay. So?”

“So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn’t change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine.”

The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades “back into a kind of ominous tolling.

“Melancholy,” Periwinkle says, “had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it’s not patriotism. It’s evolution.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Books. Sure. But mostly I build interest. Attention. Allure. A book is just packaging, just a container. This is what I’ve realized. The mistake people in the book business make is they think their job is to build good containers. Saying you’re in the book business is like a winemaker saying he’s in the bottle business. What we’re actually building is interest. A book is simply one shape that interest can take when we scale and leverage it.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“He swears. He promises. One of these days will be the day that changes everything.”
― Nathan Hill

“Listen, Samuel, really, voice of experience here? It’s a terrible burden, being idealistic. It discolors everything you’ll do later. It will haunt you constantly for all time as you become the inevitably cynical person the world requires you to be.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Yes, he’d like to go back to that night and make a different decision. He’s like to erase these last several years-years that, as he sees them now, are long and indistinguishable, and monotonous and angry. Or maybe he’d go further back than that, back far enough to see Bishop again, to help him. Or to convince his mom not to leave. But even that wouldn’t be far enough to recover whatever it is he lost, whatever he sacrificed to his mother’s brutal influence, that real part of him that was buried when he started trying to please her. What kind of person would he have become had his instincts not been screaming at him that his mother was moments from leaving? Was he ever free of that weight? Was he ever authentically himself?

These are the questions you ask when you’re cracking up. When you suddenly recognize that not only are you living a life you never intended to lead but also you are feeling assaulted and punished by the life you have. You begin searching for those early wrong turns. What moment led you into the maze? You being thinking the entrance to the maze might also be the exit, and if you can identify the moment you screwed up then you can perform some huge course correction and save yourself.”
― Nathan Hill

“Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Years later, in a high-school biology class, Samuel heard a story about a certain kind of African turtle that swam across the ocean to lay its eggs in South America. Scientists could find no reason for the enormous trip. Why did the turtles do it? The leading theory was that they began doing eons ago, when South America and Africa were still locked together. Back then, only a river might have separated the continents, and the turtles laid their eggs on the river's far bank. But then the continents began drifting apart, and the river widened by about an inch per year, which would have been invisible to the turtles. So they kept going to the same spot, the far bank of the river, each generation swimming a tiny bit farther than the last one, and after a hundred million years of this, the river had become an ocean, and yet the turtles never noticed.
This, Samuel decided, was the manner of his mother's departure. This was how she moved away - imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“His relationship with Bethany is not a Choose Your Own Adventure book. So instead he will do this: He will clarify it, illuminate it, try to understand it better. He can prevent his past from swallowing his present. So he’s trying to be in the moment, trying not to let the moment get all discolored by his fantasies of what the moment ought to be. He is trying to see Bethany as she really is. And isn’t that what everybody really wants? To be seen clearly?”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“She'd decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you're twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don't know what your small true part is until much later.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix