Top 60 Nathan Hill Quotes (2024 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. “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

4. “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

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

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

7. “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

8. “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

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

— Nathan Hill

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

20. “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

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

— Nathan Hill

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Nathan Hill

27. “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

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

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

30. “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

31. “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

32. “The nurses in Willow Glen didn’t try to prevent death. But they did try to guide you to die in the right way. Because if you died from something you weren’t supposed to die from, families became suspicious.”

— Nathan Hill

33. “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

34. “What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does.”

— Nathan Hill

35. “How was she supposed to act if she didn’t know how she was being measured? So.”

— Nathan Hill

36. “What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

38. “It’s the great flaw of journalism. The more something happens, the less newsworthy it is.”

— Nathan Hill

39. “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

40. “We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”

— 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. “Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

— Nathan Hill

43. “It’s a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear. So.”

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

45. “That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty – because the movement required it of you – and loving something you actually loved. Love – real, genuine, unasked-for love – made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.”

— Nathan Hill

46. “There is no place less communal in America – no place less cooperative and brotherly, no place with fewer feelings of shared sacrifice – than a rush-hour freeway in Chicago.”

— Nathan Hill

47. “A dormitory was a hopeless idea. Whoever thought of encasing two hundred girls in a concrete box?”

— Nathan Hill

48. “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

49. “Beyond everything else, she loves this: how swiftly things can strike her – music, people, life – how quickly they can surprise her, all of a sudden, like a punch.”

— Nathan Hill

50. “Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school.”

— Nathan Hill