Top 50 Kevin Wilson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Let’s just keep going, super cool,” I said. “Nothing to see here.”

— Kevin Wilson

2. “I had never wanted kids, because I had never wanted a man to give me a kid. The thought of it, gross; the expectation of it. But if a hole in the sky opened up and two weird children fell to Earth, smashing into the ground like meteroites, then that was something I could care for. If it gleamed like it was radiating danger, I’d hold it. I would.”

— Kevin Wilson

3. “I wasn’t destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.”

— Kevin Wilson

4. “You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.”

— Kevin Wilson

5. “I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable.”

— Kevin Wilson

6. “And I knew a secret to caring for someone, had learned it just this moment. You took care of people by not letting them know how badly you wanted your life to be different.”

— Kevin Wilson

7. “When I come back, we’ll pretend like this never happened. We’ll head to Wyoming and get back to what we do best.′ Annie had no idea what it was that they did best; the two of them together seemed below average in all categories.”

— Kevin Wilson

8. “For a second, there was that weird flicker in her eyes, that wickedness that I loved, that I wanted to live inside. A wicked child was the most beautiful thing in the world.”

— Kevin Wilson

9. “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”

— Kevin Wilson

10. “Maybe that’s what children were, a desperate need that opened you up even if you didn’t want it.”

— Kevin Wilson

11. “You know, at Vanderbilt, there was a kind of boy who wore pastel shorts and boat shoes. They wore seersucker, like they were racist lawyers from the forties. I hated them. They seemed like children but they already looked like middle-aged men. I called them Mint Julep Boys, like they missed the Old South because, even if there was horrible racism, it was worth it if it meant that they could be important by default.”

— Kevin Wilson

12. “Maybe raising children was just giving them the things you loved most in the world and hoping that they loved them, too.”

— Kevin Wilson

13. “You are very sweet,” she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, “but it’s like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don’t know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.”

— Kevin Wilson

14. “That does not surprise me,′ Annie said and once again hung up the phone thinking that she had chosen to surround herself with people who were, for lack of a better term, retarded.”

— Kevin Wilson

15. “This was how you did it, how you raised children. You built them a house that was impervious to danger and then you gave them every single thing that they could ever want, no matter how impossible. You read to them at night. Why couldn’t people figure this out?”

— Kevin Wilson

16. “I knew that until I truly believed that whatever I did was the exact right thing, I’d keep doing the wrong thing.”

— Kevin Wilson

17. “I thought it over. Dollywood. “Islands in the Stream.” That body. She was the best thing that had ever come out of Tennessee. Jesus Christ, it wasn’t even close. Bessie had got it on the first try.”

— Kevin Wilson

18. “A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.”

— Kevin Wilson

19. “How did people protect themselves? How did anyone keep this world from ruining them?”

— Kevin Wilson

20. “You don’t know anyone famous who was born in Tennessee?” I asked again, then I tried to think if I knew anyone famous from Tennessee. I knew the professional wrestler Jimmy Valiant was from a town near my own, because some guy at the Save-A-Lot talked about it all the time. But he didn’t seem famous enough.”

— Kevin Wilson

21. “My mom had once told me that being a mother was made up of “regret and then forgetting about that regret sometimes.”

— Kevin Wilson

22. “I heard Carl shout, and I turned to see Roland now on fire, though not as bright as his sister. Carl simply kicked him into the pool, where he fell like a rock, extinguished.”

— Kevin Wilson

23. “She could not smash anything without breaking herself.”

— Kevin Wilson

24. “We are so happy to have you here,” he said; he didn’t blink. I didn’t know if this was something necessary for a politician, if blinking was a sign of weakness or something. As a result, I began blinking so much that I almost started crying.”

— Kevin Wilson

25. “The kids were making me feel things, and they were complicated, because these kids were complicated, were so damaged. And I wanted to take them. But I knew that I wouldn’t. And I knew that I couldn’t give them the hope that I would.”

— Kevin Wilson

26. “It amazed Izzy the way the children rushed through so many complicated emotions without space between each one. Everything rose so quickly to the surface and then subsided, like firecrackers, and what had originally been so jarring to her, their unguarded emotion, now filled her with great comfort, that anything, no matter what it was, would eventually give way to something else.”

— Kevin Wilson

27. “It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.”

— Kevin Wilson

28. “And how easy do you think it is to obtain it? Like, do you think I can just find child sizes of Nomex clothing at Walmart? Like, for tiny firefighters? I’m having to get it altered. It’s complicated. I’m being pushed to my limits in terms of thinking creatively about our situation.”

— Kevin Wilson

29. “From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world. But if you keep something hidden away, all tied up, it’s hard to summon it when you really need it.”

— Kevin Wilson

30. “I saw an ancient man appear on the porch, wearing a huge red bow tie, a blue oxford shirt, khakis, and red suspenders. He had on little round glasses. He looked like Orville Redenbacher, the popcorn guy. He looked insane in that way of people who put great effort into choosing ridiculous clothing. I prayed this was not the doctor. “I’m the doctor!” he said, waving to the children.”

— Kevin Wilson

31. “From that point on, I guess I sort of realized that my imagination, which made life tolerable, needed to be kept a secret from the rest of the world.”

— Kevin Wilson

32. “I was pacing through the house, brushing my hair, rubbing moisturizer on my face, clipping my toenails, all these little things to make myself presentable, and, each time, I’d look at myself again in the mirror and feel like not a single thing had changed.”

— Kevin Wilson

33. “And then I got older, and, guess what? I still never felt right inside my body. I don’t think I ever will. I was kind of flamed out everywhere I went, always got a little less than what I thought I’d get. But I guess that’s okay. I think maybe it’s necessary to feel like you’re not quite settled, or maybe for some people it’s necessary.”

— Kevin Wilson

34. “I got out these little workbooks from one of the closets, all wrapped in plastic from some educational company for weirdos who believed the end of the world was coming and wouldn’t let their kids go to a normal school.”

— Kevin Wilson

35. “I want to be an artist,” he told me, like we were both admitting that we weren’t human. We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.”

— Kevin Wilson

36. “Honestly, Bessie? People don’t care about anyone but themselves. They don’t notice anything. They are never looking at what’s interesting. They’re always looking at themselves.”

— Kevin Wilson

37. “If you were rich, and you were a dude, it really felt like if you just followed a certain number of steps, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted.”

— Kevin Wilson

38. “I reminded myself to be smarter. I was smart. I just had a thick layer of stupid that had settled on top of me. But I was still wild when I needed to be. I’d get smarter.”

— Kevin Wilson

39. “The kids were happy. They had added another to their numbers. They didn’t want to set the world on fire. They just wanted to be less alone in it.”

— Kevin Wilson

40. “Real obsession, if you did it right, was the same intensity every single time, a kind of electrocution that kept your heart beating in time. It was so good.”

— Kevin Wilson

41. “This was what I finally realized, that even as we sank deeper and deeper into our lives, we were always separate. And I wondered what it would feel like, to fall but to hold on to someone else so you weren’t alone.”

— Kevin Wilson

42. “I know everyone,” I said, gesturing to the entire congregation of poolgoers. “I know them all. I just don’t like them.”

— Kevin Wilson

43. “Something was ending. Even if it had been awful, my life was ending, and it felt like this wasn’t my life anymore. It was someone else’s. And I had decided that I’d just live inside it, see if anyone noticed, and maybe it would become mine. Maybe I would love it.”

— Kevin Wilson

44. “And I know, in that moment, that my life is real, because there’s a line from this moment all the way back to that summer, when I was sixteen, when the whole world opened up and I walked through it.”

— Kevin Wilson

45. “I just... you are the most beautiful and wonderful and strangest person I have ever met. You are the most amazing person in the world. And you just have to live long enough to make the rest of the world understand that, okay? You have to stay alive.”

— Kevin Wilson

46. “Safe travels,” she said, and she allowed just the slightest musicality into her normally monotone voice. I loved how expertly bitchy she was; I wanted to study her for a year.”

— Kevin Wilson

47. “Things are bad and crazy and chaotic. But you ride it out and you don’t let it hurt you, and then there’s this stretch of time that is so calm and perfect. And that’s what was always worth waiting for.”

— Kevin Wilson

48. “And even then, sixteen years old, I knew that I would hate every person in my life who loved me, who took care of me, who helped me find a way to whatever life I would have, because I could never tell them who I was, what I’d done.”

— Kevin Wilson

49. “We’d created meaning where there was none, but, I don’t know, isn’t that art? Or at least I think is the kind of art that I like, where the obsession of one person envelops other people, transforms them.”

— Kevin Wilson

50. “We would make every object a weapon that would protect us from anything that tried to convince us that we would not live forever in happiness.”

— Kevin Wilson