63 Quotes by Nathan Hill

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?

The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.

Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard. Because his life in the summer of 2011 had been unfulfilling and going nowhere and he was so angry about it. Angry at his mother for leaving, angry at Bethany for not loving him, angry at his students for being uneducatable. He’d settled into the anger because the anger was so much easier than the work required to escape it.

Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

But it seems to Samuel that all the school is preparing them for is to sit quietly and fake that they're working. To feign the appearance of concentration when in fact they're checking sports scores or e-mail or watching videos or spacing out. And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly a your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.

A dormitory was a hopeless idea. Whoever thought of encasing two hundred girls in a concrete box?

Everyone loves a prodigy [...]. Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we're not special because we weren't born with it, which is a great excuse.

When he wasn’t around it was like he didn’t exist for her, which was painful because he thought about her almost all the time.

I saw the northern lights once. In upper Alberta. I booked a trip with this outfit called See the Northern Lights! I had wanted the northern lights to fill me with wonder. And they did. They filled me with wonder. Which was a big letdown because they exactly matched my expectations of them. They did exactly what I'd paid for. Let that be a lesson to you.