Tim Kreider > Quotes

“if you want to enjoy the rewards of being loved, you also have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
― Tim Kreider

“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 work of understanding.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that chasing it is such a fool’s errand, is that happiness isn’t a goal in itself but is only an aftereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to — by which I don’t mean ethically correctly so much as just consciously, fully engaged in the business of living. In this respect it resembles averted vision, a phenomena familiar to backyard astronomers whereby, in order to pick out a very faint star, you have to let your gaze drift casually to the space just next to it; if you look directly at it, it vanishes. And it’s also true, come to think of it, that the only stars we ever see are not the “real” stars, those cataclysms taking place in the present, but always only the light of the untouchable past.”
― Tim Kreider

“Often you don’t know whether you’re the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It’s more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups—people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that’s their intention but because it’s impossible to avoid.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“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.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“This is one reason people need to believe in God—because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“We mistakenly imagine we want 'happiness,' when we tend to picture in vague, soft-focus terms, when what we really crave is the harder-edged quality of intensity.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“My feeling toward Republicans is like my feeling about sharks: of course they're stupid and vicious. It's in their nature to be mindless, ravening killing machines. It's nothing personal. They don't know any better. Pretty much the only thing you can do about them is stay out of their waters and, if you're unlucky enough to meet with one, shoot it through its rudimentary brain with a spear gun.”
― Tim Kreider, Twilight of the Assholes

“Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.”
― Tim Kreider

“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. Officially, you owe each other nothing.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“I've demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“If you manage to make it to some semblance of adulthood, just showing up turns out to be one of the kindest, most selfless things you can do for someone.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and pass them on while there’s still time. You begin, embarrassingly belatedly, to see them as people with lives long preceding your own.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“It’s easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“What someone’s lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves. These inventions illuminate the negative spaces of someone’s self-image, their vanity and insecurities and most childish wishes, as we can infer from warped starlight the presence of a far vaster mass of dark matter.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small rude incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons

“Of course no one is the Right Person when you meet her; this is just an illusion necessary to lure you into investing the years and making the sacrifices necessary to love someone. It's like telling yourself your book is going to be a masterpiece and make you rich in order to undertake the laborious ordeal of writing it. It's only after making all those compromises and forfeitures, and amassing a shared fortune in memories, regrets, in-jokes and secrets, fights and reconciliations, that that person becomes the only possible one for you, unique and irreplaceable.”
― Tim Kreider, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You: Essays

“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 but the more urgent worry that you're running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons

“What I could relate to was the common fear that you are secretly so uniquely screwed-up that there is no way anyone would like you if they really knew you.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“Defriending isn’t just unrecognized by some social oversight; it’s protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn’t just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. 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. Officially, you owe each other nothing.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“For all his secrecy and fear of being seen, he was touched that we had observed him so closely, and with such love. He loved that we knew him. This is one reason people need to believe in God -- because we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

“I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone.”
― Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing