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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: 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. 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.

lies, personality, secrets

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.

ignorance, survival

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 artereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to – by which I don’t mean ethically correct but fully, consicously engaged in the business of living.

happiness, happy-living, memories

Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day?

anger, madness, shooting

Most people are just too self-absorbed, well-meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us. It’s more often a boring, complicated story of wrong assumptions, miscommunication, bad administration, and cover-ups—people trying, and mostly failing, to do the right thing, hurting each other not because that’s their intention but because it’s impossible to avoid.

anger, relationships

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

empathy, understanding

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.

empathy, judgment, understanding

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.

adulthood, kindness

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 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. My cruelest hope for the Tea Party is that one of their candidates wins the nomination for the presidency and they implode of their hubristic stupidity. But at least when I hear about them now, instead of reflexively picturing some braying ignoramus like Michele Bachmann, I try to remember that Matt [a friend of the Author’s, ed] is out in that crowd somewhere, too. God agreed to spare Sodom if ten good men could be found within its walls (Abraham had to haggle him down from fifty). He ended up napalming those perverts anyway but the basic principle of sparing the sinner for the sake of the righteous, or the shithead for the sake of the basically okay, remains sound.

american-politics, tea-party, tolerance

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.

competition-with-others, stress

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

loyalty, progressive

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.