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61 " (People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist most fiercely within themselves.) "
― Tim Kreider , We Learn Nothing
62 " The problem is that most of us hated school. His fallacy was much the same as progressivism's: the assumption that if he could just explain the facts clearly, build a convincing enough argument, eventually everyone would come around to his conclusion. But people aren't interested in lectures; they want to hear stories. Which is why the right holds the demagogic advantage over the left in America; they tell a simpler, more satisfying story. "
63 " We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we take out to treasure only rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy. "
64 " Because the end of a friendship isn’t even formally acknowledged—no Little Talk, no papers served—you walk around effectively heartbroken but embarrassed to admit it, even to yourself. It’s a special, open-ended kind of pain, like having a disease that doesn’t even have a name. You worry you must be pathetically oversensitive to feel so wounded over such a thing. You can’t tell people, “My friend broke up with me,” without sounding like a nine-year-old. The only phrase I can think of that even recognizes this kind of hurt—“You look like you just lost your best friend”—is only ever spoken by adults to children. You can give yourself the same ineffectual lecture your parents used to give you as a kid: anyone who’d treat you this way isn’t a very good friend and doesn’t deserve your friendship anyway. But the nine-year-old in you knows that the reason they’ve ditched you is that you suck. "
65 " The only people who seem to believe in the phenomenon of men and women just being good friends all seem to have good friends who are pining miserably after them, waiting for them to break up with their significant others. "
66 " 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. "
67 " Nietzsche wrote, "One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic". Or, as The Dude put it: "You're not wrong, Walter - you're just an asshole". Less quotable, and often overlooked, is Walter's response: "Okay, then." The Walters of the world don't mid being assholes; what matters to them is being right. "
68 " during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. "
69 " The smell of hospitals is like small talk at a funeral—you know its function is to cover up something else. "
70 " Nobody loves newborns for who they are; they aren’t anyone yet. "
71 " Of course time doesn’t stop for anyone; alcohol just keeps you from feeling it, the way it’ll keep a man cozy while he freezes to death. "
72 " Because there’s no formal etiquette for ending a friendship, most people do it in the laziest, most passive and painless way possible, by unilaterally dropping any effort to sustain it and letting the other person figure it out for themselves. (I "
73 " they’d been impressed by facts about Skelly instead of by him. And knowing things about someone is not the same as knowing him. "
74 " At such times we are certainly not at our best but we are undeniably at our most human—utterly vulnerable, naked and laid open, a mess. Whenever "
75 " When somebody tells us something that would be disturbing or inconvenient for us to believe, we reflexively scrutinize that "
76 " 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. "
77 " . . .It turns out that you can blow life off for as long as you want, but you still have to take the finals. "
78 " It came as a belated epiphany to me when I learned that the Greeks had several different words for the disparate phenomena that in English we indiscriminately lump together under the label love. Our inability to distinguish between, say, eros (sexual love) and storgé (the love that grows out of friendship) leads to more than semantic confusion. Careening through this world with such a crude taxonomical guide to human passion is as foolhardy as piloting a plane ignorant of the difference between stratus and cumulonimbus, knowing only the word cloud. "
79 " It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day. "
80 " Oh, yes.” I’ve known kisses so narcotic they made my eyes roll back in my head. For a few weeks one winter I walked around feeling like I had a miniature sun in my heart. "