“Moments that seem inconsequential until you have a reason to hold on to them, arrange them in a pattern.”
― Stay True
― Stay True
“There were people in our dorm I wanted to befriend, where the inertia of proximity, I was certain, would one day result in closeness. I’d find an empty seat in the dining hall and admire your thrift shop T-shirt, your ironic pin; maybe we’d start going to see bands together. Perhaps we would cross paths in the foreign section of the video store; I would stay up late, listening to your problems, and then I’d share my secrets in return.”
― Stay True
― Stay True
“People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called *character,* a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to the other, more instantly negotiable virtues.... character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Slouching Towards Bethlehem
― Slouching Towards Bethlehem
“Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Stay True: A Memoir
― Stay True: A Memoir
“Civilization means transmission, he said. Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist. Get the picture? It'd be good for exactly zero.”
― Hear the Wind Sing
― Hear the Wind Sing
Nolan’s 2025 Year in Books
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