Top 60 Nathan Hill Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”

— Nathan Hill

2. “If you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.”

— Nathan Hill

3. “The mall’s overwhelmingness was meant to replace your imagination. Forget trying to dream up your desires; the mall had already dreamed them up for you.”

— Nathan Hill

4. “It’s because a lighthouse is two-faced, and this is how she feels each time she visits. A lighthouse is both an invitation and a warning. A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger.”

— Nathan Hill

5. “Listen, Samuel, really, voice of experience here? It’s a terrible burden, being idealistic. It discolors everything you’ll do later. It will haunt you constantly for all time as you become the inevitably cynical person the world requires you to be.”

— Nathan Hill

6. “When Samuel was a child reading a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, he’d keep a bookmark at the spot of a very hard decision, so that if the story turned out poorly, he could go back and try again. More than anything he wants life to behave this way.”

— Nathan Hill

7. “He swears. He promises. One of these days will be the day that changes everything.”

— Nathan Hill

8. “Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces.”

— Nathan Hill

9. “Sometime we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.”

— Nathan Hill

10. “It’s no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise.”

— Nathan Hill

11. “Books. Sure. But mostly I build interest. Attention. Allure. A book is just packaging, just a container. This is what I’ve realized. The mistake people in the book business make is they think their job is to build good containers. Saying you’re in the book business is like a winemaker saying he’s in the bottle business. What we’re actually building is interest. A book is simply one shape that interest can take when we scale and leverage it.”

— Nathan Hill

12. “He would never be a musical genius, but he could be a person a musical genius loved. Such were the spoils of love, he realized, that her success was also, by some odd refraction, his.”

— Nathan Hill

13. “What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones.”

— Nathan Hill

14. “And I told you to bring nine toys, she said. you bought eight. Next time try to pay more attention. And the disappointment in her voice made him cry even harder, so hard that he couldn’t talk and thus he couldn’t tell her that he put eight toys in the wagon because the ninth toy was the wagon itself.”

— Nathan Hill

15. “But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all – just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.”

— Nathan Hill

16. “Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new; it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid;.”

— Nathan Hill

17. “Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.”

— Nathan Hill

18. “Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.”

— Nathan Hill

19. “There is no greater ache than this: guilt and regret in equal measure.”

— Nathan Hill

20. “Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.”

— Nathan Hill

21. “Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion.”

— Nathan Hill

22. “When he told Faye about the Nix, he said the moral was: Don’t trust things that are too good to be true. But then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.” Samuel.”

— Nathan Hill

23. “I saw the northern lights once. In upper Alberta. I booked a trip with this outfit called See the Northern Lights! I had wanted the northern lights to fill me with wonder. And they did. They filled me with wonder. Which was a big letdown because they exactly matched my expectations of them. They did exactly what I’d paid for. Let that be a lesson to you.”

— Nathan Hill

24. “Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.”

— Nathan Hill

25. “To most of the students, the education they received at school was only an incidental thing. To them, the overwhelming point of school was to learn how to behave in school. How to contort themselves to the school’s rigid rules. Take, for example, bathroom breaks. No subject was more highly managed than the students’ various excreta.”

— Nathan Hill

26. “You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”

— Nathan Hill

27. “It is remarkable how quickly extraordinary things turn ordinary.”

— Nathan Hill

28. “There is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones.”

— Nathan Hill

29. “You never even decided that your life would be this way. It’s simply the way it’s become. You’ve been carved out by the things that have happened to you like how the canyon can’t tell the river which way to shape it. It just allows it to be cut.”

— Nathan Hill

30. “Imagine a single drop of water: that’s the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that’s the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that’s Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For.”

— Nathan Hill

31. “The law was written at a time when folks were not that interested in the Fourth Amendment. Or the Fifth Amendment, for that matter, Or, actually, the Sixth.” He chortled lightly to himself. “Or the eighth.”

— Nathan Hill

32. “Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.”

— Nathan Hill

33. “Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them.”

— Nathan Hill

34. “And old Cronkite had two thoughts about this. First, anyone who thinks television can bring the nation together to have a real dialogue and begin to understand one another with empathy and compassion is suffering a great delusion. And second, Nixon is definitely going to win this thing.”

— Nathan Hill

35. “Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we’re not special because we weren’t born with it, which is a great excuse.”

— Nathan Hill

36. “In America, the government is accountable to the people, not the other way around,” says a constitutional law scholar sympathetic to the antiwar movement on the subject of the anonymous police.”

— Nathan Hill

37. “In class, Laura almost always stares into her lap, where she hides her phone. She thinks if the phone is in her lap she has effectively concealed it. She has no idea how obvious and transparent this maneuver is. Samuel has not asked her to stop checking her phone in class, mostly so he can savage her grade at the end of the semester when he doles out “participation points.”

— Nathan Hill

38. “It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

— Nathan Hill

39. “Will she ever understand this? Who knows. Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.”

— Nathan Hill

40. “And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.”

— Nathan Hill

41. “Of course, eating these food items is not what I might describe as pleasant, since they’re tough and scorched and moistureless from their all-day cooking on high-temperature rollers. Sometimes biting through a burrito’s thick tortilla casing can feel like chewing through your own toe calluses.” “That’s an image that’s going to linger.”

— Nathan Hill

42. “We never actually forget things. We only lose the path back to them.”

— Nathan Hill

43. “The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.”

— Nathan Hill

44. “The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.”

— Nathan Hill

45. “Perhaps, sir, for our purposes, sir, you shouldn’t think of it as your mother abandoned you. Instead, perhaps think of it as she gave you up for adoption slightly later than usual.”

— Nathan Hill

46. “Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If.”

— Nathan Hill

47. “And this happened all over, in every working group, idiosyncratic professors from two dozen academic departments all fighting for explicit mission-statement representation. So, in the end, it was pretty easy to understand why the mission statement came out looking the way it did: a compound-complex, multi-semicoloned, many-branching grammatical nightmare that forced the English department to stage a collective symbolic walkout when the faculty senate approved it. Since.”

— Nathan Hill

48. “He’s like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn’t get what he wanted.”

— Nathan Hill

49. “The protestors and the police, the progressives and the authoritarians – they require each other, they create each other, because they need an opponent to demonize. The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which is why today was fantastic, from an advertising standpoint.”

— Nathan Hill

50. “He longs for someone in the crowd to see the haunted expression he’s sure is playing all over his face right now and come up to him and say, You seem to be experiencing overwhelming pain, how can I help you?”

— Nathan Hill