90 Quotes by Tim Kreider

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.

Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if I'd been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I would've been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. 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.

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.

with her fetishistic attachment to the color purple

But I also know that all around me the air is full of songs too beautiful for me to hear. Sometimes I'll see a pair of electric-blue damselflies coupled in flight and I remember how it feels to be weightless.

But I also know that all around me the air is full of songs too beautiful for me to hear. Sometimes I'll see a pair of electric-blue damselflies coupled in flight, and I remember how it felt to be weightless.

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

If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox.”1 A.