Top 40 Noah Hawley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In the absence of facts... we tell ourselves stories.”

— Noah Hawley

2. “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”

— Noah Hawley

3. “To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.”

— Noah Hawley

4. “We are all equal in the face of nature.”

— Noah Hawley

5. “The day I sobered up, I stopped talking,” he says. “What was there to say? You need hope to form a thought. It takes – I don’t know – optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what’s the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?” “There’s a name for that,” she says. “It’s called depression.”

— Noah Hawley

6. “Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave?”

— Noah Hawley

7. “Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.”

— Noah Hawley

8. “It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.”

— Noah Hawley

9. “Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.”

— Noah Hawley

10. “Everyone has their own path. The choices they’ve made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You get on an elevator with a dozen strangers. You ride a bus, wait in line for the bathroom. It happens every day. To try to predict the places we’ll go and the people we’ll meet would be pointless.”

— Noah Hawley

11. “True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day a thing we take for granted as normal, a child’s bedroom and transform it into something sinister untrustworthy is to undermine the very fabric of life.”

— Noah Hawley

12. “Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?”

— Noah Hawley

13. “It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful.”

— Noah Hawley

14. “What’s a handshake, after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn’t have a knife behind his back.”

— Noah Hawley

15. “This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm. He.”

— Noah Hawley

16. “But then isn’t that what marriage is, two people fighting for land rights to the same six inches?”

— Noah Hawley

17. “But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.”

— Noah Hawley

18. “On the edge of things was the sound of the ocean, that tectonic drum, the heartbeat of the earth.”

— Noah Hawley

19. “It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world – sights, sounds, smells – into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.”

— Noah Hawley

20. “Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”

— Noah Hawley

21. “Life is made of these moments – of one’s physical being moving through time and space – and we string them together into a story, and that story becomes our life.”

— Noah Hawley

22. “Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye – an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.”

— Noah Hawley

23. “Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.”

— Noah Hawley

24. “Isn’t it better to be happy with a problem,” he said, “than to be miserable with it?” Don’t wallow, Jack told a nation stumbling under recession. When life gets hard, you need to get harder. This.”

— Noah Hawley

25. “Staring up at me, hearing my tired voice, he reached out his tiny hand. He knew me, even though he had never seen me before. And I knew him. He was the love I’d been trying to express my whole life.”

— Noah Hawley

26. “Everybody acts like the future is so far away, when really every moment that passes is the future.”

— Noah Hawley

27. “Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.”

— Noah Hawley

28. “You need hope to form a thought. It takes-I don’t know-optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because really, what’s the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?”

— Noah Hawley

29. “We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough.”

— Noah Hawley

30. “David is in the entertainment business, which is what people in his line of work call television news these days. A Roman circus of information and opinions.”

— Noah Hawley

31. “He worried that he was destined to be a hobbyist, a dreamer incapable of finishing anything. The fact that the college seemed to encourage this kind of “experimentation” made him doubt its motives as an institution of higher learning.”

— Noah Hawley

32. “But in the same way a man’s nose and ears become exaggerated as he ages, so do the psychological issues that define him. We.”

— Noah Hawley

33. “That swirling devil’s clot, that black maelstrom of cylindrical majesty. It is a swirling gray spider egg unspooling, filled with rotten teeth. A biblical monster, God’s vengeance. Whirring.”

— Noah Hawley

34. “I was an old man, the father of the vilified. Would this be my life from here on out? Was I to become the argumentative man who can’t control the volume of his own voice? The conspiracy nut with boxes of data who spouts dates and facts, as if coincidence alone can prove the existence of God?”

— Noah Hawley

35. “In this way he used her as the North Star on a journey where you always want to go south. It was helpful, aligning himself in this way. It gave him something to tune to, like a violin to a piano.”

— Noah Hawley

36. “A private plane sits on a runway in Martha’s Vineyard, forward stairs deployed.”

— Noah Hawley

37. “It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness.”

— Noah Hawley

38. “They are looking for the smooth remains of bottles, shiny coins of broken glass worn smooth by the sea. This is what happens when things break. The pieces separate, scatter. They are battered by the elements, buffed and polished smooth, then deposited on far-off beaches. All your hopes and dreams.”

— Noah Hawley

39. “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. – Voltaire.”

— Noah Hawley

40. “The first adopters would be the ones who’d been preaching his philosophy for years. And right behind them would be the people who had been searching their whole lives for someone to say out loud what they’d always felt in their hearts. And once you had those two groups, the curious and the undecided would follow in droves.”

— Noah Hawley

41. “Everybody has a theory, Judge Nadir has come to believe. A conviction, dogged and tenacious, which they refuse to surrender. This is the American way.”

— Noah Hawley

42. “What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remain obsessed, even as our bodies move on?”

— Noah Hawley

43. “The world of children is the world that makes sense.”

— Noah Hawley

44. “She liked his eyes, the way they crinkled when he smiled.”

— Noah Hawley