Tim Kreider Quotes

#1. Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him

Tim Kreider

#2. The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play.

Tim Kreider

#3. The awkwardness of adolescence still clinging to them.

Tim Kreider

#4. It turns out that when there is some conspicuous gap or contradiction at the center of someone's existence, there is probably a very specific, obvious reason for it, and the reason you're avoiding confronting it directly is that it's something you don't want to know.

Tim Kreider

#5. (People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist most fiercely within themselves.)

Tim Kreider

#6. Of course time doesn't stop for anyone; alcohol just keeps you from feeling it, the way it'll keep a man cozy while he freezes to death.

Tim Kreider

#7. 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

#8. But then anytime you join in a mass movement you're going to find yourself standing alongside idiots. One reason people go to mass rallies is to become stupider and surer of themselves than they are when they're alone.

Tim Kreider

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Him a first edition of Ray Bradbury's Dark Carnival and another who thinks I owe

Tim Kreider

#14. We are not infinitely malleable

Tim Kreider

#15. Biblical, Talmudic, or Koranic literalists remind me of children wrinkling their noses at Belon oysters and asking for more Chef Boy-E-Dee. They want the world to be as simple as they are.

Tim Kreider

#16. Jenny Boylan might be the one person in this world whom I now think of purely as a human being, free of all the corporeal baggage of chromosomes, hormones, and footwear.

Tim Kreider

#17. One of those nightmares where it's the final exam for a course

Tim Kreider

#18. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate.

Tim Kreider

#19. At such times we are certainly not at our best but we are undeniably at our most human - utterly vulnerable, naked and laid open, a mess. Whenever

Tim Kreider

#20. It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Tim Kreider

#21. I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone.

Tim Kreider

#22. 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

#23. When somebody tells us something that would be disturbing or inconvenient for us to believe, we reflexively scrutinize that

Tim Kreider

#24. Because there's no formal etiquette for ending a friendship, most people do it in the laziest, most passive and painless way possible, by unilaterally dropping any effort to sustain it and letting the other person figure it out for themselves. (I

Tim Kreider

#25. Master whose every whim is law. (Note to friends with children: I am referring only

Tim Kreider

#26. 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

#27. We want to be hurt, astonished, reminded we're alive.

Tim Kreider

#28. 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

#29. Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.

Tim Kreider

#30. The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories.

Tim Kreider

#31. It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.

Tim Kreider

#32. Oh, yes. I've known kisses so narcotic they made my eyes roll back in my head. For a few weeks one winter I walked around feeling like I had a miniature sun in my heart.

Tim Kreider

#33. Life is too short to be busy.

Tim Kreider

#34. We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country we want this to be: some of us would just like to live in Canada with better weather; others want something more like Iran with Jesus.

Tim Kreider

#35. Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.

Tim Kreider

#36. The only people who seem to believe in the phenomenon of men and women just being good friends all seem to have good friends who are pining miserably after them, waiting for them to break up with their significant others.

Tim Kreider

#37. It's easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing.

Tim Kreider

#38. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

Tim Kreider

#39. 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

#40. I hate all the boring in-between parts of life.

Tim Kreider

#41. It's one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we're alive when we're reminded we're going to die,

Tim Kreider

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. So it's tempting to read other people's lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people's lives, island universes, unknowable. Not

Tim Kreider

#45. It's not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it's something we collectively force one another to do.

Tim Kreider

#46. Most of us liberals are so worried that we might secretly be racists that we're convinced this means we cannot really be racists.)

Tim Kreider

#47. They'd been impressed by facts about Skelly instead of by him. And knowing things about someone is not the same as knowing him.

Tim Kreider

#48. At worst, we're considered selfish or immature; women who don't want to have children are regarded as unnatural, traitors to their sex, if not the species.

Tim Kreider

#49. During that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The horrible thing that I'd always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened.

Tim Kreider

#50. The trick, I suppose, is to find someone with a touch of the pathology you require, but not so much that it will destroy you. But,

Tim Kreider

#51. We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we take out to treasure only rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: I'm happy.

Tim Kreider

#52. Because the essence of creativity is fucking around; art is that which is done for the hell of it.

Tim Kreider

#53. What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.

Tim Kreider

#54. The smell of hospitals is like small talk at a funeral - you know its function is to cover up something else.

Tim Kreider

#55. Nobody loves newborns for who they are; they aren't anyone yet.

Tim Kreider

#56. 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

#57. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.

Tim Kreider

#58. So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have this same tone of thrilled vindication: these are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it.

Tim Kreider

#59. Introducing these people to our friends and family is, in a way, more heedlessly exhibitionistic than posting nude photos or sex tapes of ourselves online; it's like letting everyone watch our uncensored dreams.

Tim Kreider

#60. 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

#61. It turns out that you can blow life off for as long as you want, but you still have to take the finals.

Tim Kreider

#62. [...] as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation.

Tim Kreider

#63. The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economy system.

Tim Kreider

#64. It's always a sad revelation when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that, for them, your friendship was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don't need you anymore. There

Tim Kreider

#65. His professed philosophy of "Shandyism" is a defiant frivolity that declines to take the world as seriously as it tries to insist upon. In

Tim Kreider

#66. 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