Top 80 Nathan Hill Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “How was she supposed to act if she didn’t know how she was being measured? So.”

— Nathan Hill

52. “When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention. This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband. What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty, the illusion that he will never be hurt again.”

— Nathan Hill

53. “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

54. “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

55. “It is an odd feeling, to sense one’s aliveness, for perhaps the very first time, to understand that life up until this point was not being lived, exactly; it was being endured.”

— Nathan Hill

56. “They are both in Chicago to become orphans.”

— Nathan Hill

57. “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility.”

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

59. “And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don’t know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving.”

— Nathan Hill

60. “This weird and precious and private family thing becomes something altogether new when alchemized by Facebook – it gains a second, uglier entendre. It becomes instrumental. Toby becomes a prop. The whole thing turns into an ad. Such is the inexorable mathematics of Facebook: whatever goes on Facebook just becomes more like Facebook.”

— Nathan Hill

61. “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

62. “And didn’t Jack do the same thing? He needed Elizabeth so much, and that need was plainly suffocating her. He was so fearful of losing her that he’d choked the life right out of their marriage. Evelyn had tried to teach him this very lesson, a long time ago. She’d told him: When you cling too hard to what you want, you miss what’s really there.”

— Nathan Hill

63. “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

64. “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

65. “So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.”

— Nathan Hill

66. “The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate. Which.”

— Nathan Hill

67. “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

68. “This, it turned out, was the most savage, most hurtful thing about being a parent: it wasn’t just coming face-to-face with all your own shortcomings and inadequacies, but it was also seeing those shortcomings embodied in your child.”

— Nathan Hill

69. “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

70. “All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking.”

— Nathan Hill

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

— Nathan Hill

72. “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

73. “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

74. “The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers – he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves. And this saddened him. He.”

— Nathan Hill

75. “Every couple has a story they tell themselves about themselves, a story that hums beneath them as a kind of engine, motoring them through trouble and into the future.”

— Nathan Hill

76. “She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.”

— Nathan Hill

77. “Marriage, my dear, is a condition whereby you find so many qualities within another person that you want to have within you that you’re willing to take on their flaws, which will, by extension, also be within you, for life.”

— Nathan Hill

78. “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

79. “And other people’s attention feels exhausting because their expectations come across as an impossible obligation.”

— Nathan Hill

80. “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

81. “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

82. “It’s an altogether manic and ceaseless conversation, a conversation that feels sometimes like falling down stairs, barely keeping upright, taken by gravity, skipping, grasping, and then somehow landing, magically on one’s feet, intact and triumphant.”

— Nathan Hill

83. “And now people were watching other people watching other people play video games. It was like a Darwin fish parade of sloth.”

— Nathan Hill