Noah Hawley > Quotes

“It's hard to be sad when you're being useful.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Everyone has their own path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we'll go and the people we'll meet would be pointless.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.
And then it's over.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“In the absence of facts.... we tell ourselves stories.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“There are things in this world that no human being should be able to endure. We should die of heartbreak, but we do not. Instead, we are forced to survive, to bear witness.”
― Noah Hawley, The Good Father

“You have kids and you think I made you, so we're the same, but it's not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“I'm thirty-six years old and I've been married once and he left and I don't want to feel this way anymore. Like I can't be vulnerable. Can't relax. It's exhausting, always being on the defensive, keeping my guard up. I feel like Cuba.”
― Noah Hawley, Other People's Weddings

“...people can say all kinds of things without ever opening their mouths...”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Life is made of these moments -- of one's physical being moving through time and space -- and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“هنر نه تنها در آثار هنری، بلکه در ذهن نظاره گران نیز وجود دارد.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“David is in the entertainment business, which is what people in his line of work call television news these days. A Roman circus of information and opinions.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond. To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same? Watching, by definition, is different from doing.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Staring up at me, hearing my tired voice, he reached out his tiny hand. He knew me, even though he had never seen me before. And I knew him. He was the love I'd been trying to express my whole life.”
― Noah Hawley, The Good Father

“You need hope to form a thought. It takes-I don't know-optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because really, what's the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“At last count there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you’re not paying attention.”
― Noah Hawley, Anthem

“If there are any limits to what can be done. The limit is right here (in your head). You've got to get physically fit between your ears. Muscles don't know anything. They have to be thought.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“But then isn't that what marriage is, two people fighting for land rights to the same six inches?”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“The day I sobered up, I stopped talking,” he says. “What was there to say? You need hope to form a thought. It takes—I don’t know—optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what’s the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?” “There’s a name for that,” she says. “It’s called depression.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“A sunrise, a winter squall, birds flying in a perfect V. These were things that were. The truth, visceral and sublime, of the universe, was that it existed whether we witnessed it or not. Majesty and beauty, these were qualities we projected upon it. A storm was just weather. A sunrise was simply a celestial pattern. It's not that he didn't enjoy them. It's that he didn't require anything more from the universe than that it exist, that it behave consistently-- that gravity worked the way it always worked, that lift and drag were constants.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“But you grew out of it.” “Grew? No. I burned it all down, drank myself into a stupor, pissed off everyone I knew.” They think about that for a moment, how sometimes the only way to learn not to play with fire is to go up in flames.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

“True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day a thing we take for granted as normal, a child’s bedroom and transform it into something sinister untrustworthy is to undermine the very fabric of life.”
― Noah Hawley, Before the Fall