90 Quotes by Tim Kreider

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.

I said, “I did not know that.” This datum basically passed through my brain as a neutrino does through the earth, interacting with nothing.

Throughout this essay I’m afraid I’ll be using the terms ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’, and ‘the left’ not quite interchangeably but pretty indistinctly. ... ‘Progressives’ are what liberals call themselves now that ‘liberal’ is a slur ... and as far as I can tell ‘leftists’ are liberals who get mad if you call them liberals because liberals are all bourgeois patsies of The Man.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.