“ We tend to make up [stories] in the same circumstances in which people come up with conspiracy theories: ignorance and powerlessness. And they share the same flawed premise as most conspiracy theories… Tim Kreider
“ Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn't an achievable goal in itself but only an afteraf… Tim Kreider
“ You'd think that it would make them all the more credible to be free of any obvious agenda or emotional bias, motivated only by objective logic. But there's something off-putting about these hyperrati… Tim Kreider
“ 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,… Tim Kreider
“ I don't know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral… Tim Kreider
“ Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn't an obtainable goal in itself but only an arteref… Tim Kreider
“ What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people. Tim Kreider
“ 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… Tim Kreider
“ For all his secrecy and fear of being seen, he was touched that we had observed him so closely, and with such love. He loved that we knew him. This is one reason people need to believe in God -- becau… Tim Kreider
“ I'm not issuing some naïve plea for civility or bipartisanship here, or pretending that the opposing sides in this fight are intellectually equal. We have irreconcilable visions of the kind of country… Tim Kreider
“ 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 coll… Tim Kreider
“ It’s easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing. 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 hel… Tim Kreider
“ 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 con… Tim Kreider
“ At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories,… Tim Kreider
“ The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play. Tim Kreider
“ 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 t… Tim Kreider
“ 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,… Tim Kreider
“ The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There's only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other's guts. Tim Kreider
“ 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. Th… Tim Kreider
