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An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1) QUOTES

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1) QUOTES

1 " You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you're pretending to be. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

2 " Even on this most terrible days, even when the worst of us are all we can think of, I am proud to be a human. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

3 " The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and and frightened and weak is amazing. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

4 " ...He kept reading to me until well after I was asleep. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

5 " Frankly, I've worked my whole life to not be adorable with only limited success, and two adorable people dating is waaaay too cute for me. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

6 " I don't think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture but as weapons in a war. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

7 " Bring People together and promote a simple change and a better world. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

8 " I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

9 " It's weird to talk about these things as if they are fact since they were in a dream, but the fact that everyone experienced it in precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

10 " We are irrational beings, easy to manipulate if you're willing to do whatever it takes. That's exactly how terrorists convince themselves that murder is worthwhile. And the wound it left, it was larger than those lives lost; it was a wound we would all have to live with forever. The purity of my feeling for Carl was gone and I would never get it back. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

11 " Just working through what other people had done gave me a feeling that this was all actually worth it. When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small. Hopping from cable news show to cable news show to discuss controversy after controversy had made me small. I thought only about the fight, not why I was fighting. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

12 " But when you walked out of that building, you created a new history that we have to live in now." She did not say this as something I should be proud of, more something that I had to live with. The dart hit its mark. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

13 " The clattering of humanity mixed in all its randomness was as relaxing to me as crickets chirping beside a rushing brook. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

14 " I mean, it’s AWESOME, but it’s also a little bit “New York awe­some,” you know?


How do I explain how I felt about it? I guess ... well ... in New York City people spend ten years making something amazing happen, something that captures the essence of an idea so perfectly that sud­denly the world becomes ten times clearer. It’s beautiful and it’s powerful and someone devoted a huge piece of their life to it. The local news does a story about it and everyone goes “Neat!” and then tomorrow we forget about it in favor of some other ABSOLUTELY PERFECT AND REMARKABLE THING. That doesn’t make those things un­wonderful or not unique ... It’s just that there are a lot of people doing a lot of amazing things, so eventually you get a little jaded. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

15 " I’m not much older now than I was then, but in a lot of ways, obviously, I’m a different person. So it is easy for me to recognize that I made some good decisions and some bad ones. But it’s telling that, with this, I knew it was a bad idea even then but I still couldn’t control myself. Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn’t have liked what I found, so I didn’t. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

16 " The whole time I was in front of the camera, I was thinking of the artist. A fellow creator who had poured her soul into something truly remarkable that might simply be ignored by the whole world. I was trying to get in her head. I was trying to figure out why she had created this thing and, in the same breath, calling out the world for its callous ignorance of beauty and form... I wanted people to wae up and spend a few moments looking at the exceptional amazement of human creation. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

17 " One of the best things about having money is paying people to do good work. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

18 " They tell you power corrupts. They never tell you how quickly. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

19 " Behold the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

20 " Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. "

― Hank Green , An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)