Top 60 Steve Toltz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I think that’s the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.”

— Steve Toltz

2. “When you put so much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.”

— Steve Toltz

3. “Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.”

— Steve Toltz

4. “Losers blame their parents; Failures blame their kids.”

— Steve Toltz

5. “When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness – it tastes like vinegar. That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.”

— Steve Toltz

6. “I groaned. Man and his codes! Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honor, he’s so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.”

— Steve Toltz

7. “Don’t be afraid to have nothing.”

— Steve Toltz

8. “There’s nothing perplexing to me about a leafy shrub evolving out of the big bang, but that the post office exists because carbon exploded out of a supernova is a phenomenon so outrageous it makes my head twitch.”

— Steve Toltz

9. “To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.”

— Steve Toltz

10. “After all, memory may be the only thing on earth we can truly manipulate to serve us, so we don’t have to look back at ourselves in the receding past and think, What an arsehole!”

— Steve Toltz

11. “People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.”

— Steve Toltz

12. “Optimism isnt funny unless you are laughing at the person, whereas extreme pessimism is extremely funny. Its exaggeration.”

— Steve Toltz

13. “We’re always sick and we just don’t know it. What we mean by health is only when our constant physical deterioration is undetectable.”

— Steve Toltz

14. “Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.”

— Steve Toltz

15. “About pain and suffering – he thought that you can bear it all. It’s only the fear of pain and suffering that is unbearable.”

— Steve Toltz

16. “Let’s not mince words: the inside of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade.”

— Steve Toltz

17. “I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon.”

— Steve Toltz

18. “The moment seemed endless, but it was probably only half that.”

— Steve Toltz

19. “I didn’t think anyone who had to demand respect ever got it.”

— Steve Toltz

20. “I actually went into writing first to supplement my income, which was a strange thing to do, and actually failed.”

— Steve Toltz

21. “Raymond Chandler I love a lot, and the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. I really love his voice.”

— Steve Toltz

22. “There is something so arbitrary about prizes.”

— Steve Toltz

23. “I have too much free time. Free time makes people think; thinking makes people morbidly self-absorbed; and unless you are watertight and flawless, excessive self-absorption leads to depression. That’s why depression is the number-two disease in the world, behind Internet porn eyestrain.”

— Steve Toltz

24. “I feel like I took a wrong turn but went so far down the road I didn’t have the energy to turn back. Please, Martin, you must remember this. It’s never too late to turn back if you make a wrong turn. Even if it takes you a decade to backtrack, you must do it. Don’t get stuck because the road back seems too long or too dark. Don’t be afraid to have nothing.”

— Steve Toltz

25. “What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don’t you realize he doesn’t want it? His real wish is not to die.”

— Steve Toltz

26. “The thing that makes a man go crazy isn’t loneliness or suffering after all – it’s being kept in a state of perpetual dread.”

— Steve Toltz

27. “Negotiating with memories isn’t easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?”

— Steve Toltz

28. “We drank for another hour and I mutilated many of my most coherent thoughts by putting them into words.”

— Steve Toltz

29. “Change is when new selves come into the foreground while others recede into forgotten landscapes. Maybe definition of having lived a full life is when every citizen in the hall of selves gets to take you for a spin, the commander the lover the coward the misanthrope the fighter the priest the moral guardian the immoral guardian the lover of life the hater of life the fool the judge the jury the executioner...”

— Steve Toltz

30. “The past is truly an inoperable tumour that spreads to the present.”

— Steve Toltz

31. “I couldn’t help but be impressed. If you knew how hard these bastards worked, you’d never say anything negative about privilege again, and you wouldn’t even want it for yourself.”

— Steve Toltz

32. “That’s how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world’s problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there’s no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that’s the source of our descent, and it doesn’t start in the boardrooms or the war rooms either. It starts in the home.”

— Steve Toltz

33. “I learned that detaching is easy. Retreat? Easy. Hiding? Dissolving? Extraction? Simple. When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure.”

— Steve Toltz

34. “There’s nothing I would do again the same, and if given the opportunity, I would decline the opportunity.”

— Steve Toltz

35. “Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? True satisfaction can’t exist as long as there’s one itch left to scratch. And I don’t care who you are, there’s always an itch.”

— Steve Toltz

36. “Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?”

— Steve Toltz

37. “I concluded that my father had tried to erase any image of his brother so he might forget him. The futility of the attempt was obvious; when you put in that much effort to forget someone, the effort itself becomes a memory. Then you have to forget the forgetting, and that too is memorable.”

— Steve Toltz

38. “With medical science improving at roughly the same rate as our environmental situation worsens, the most likely scenario is that the world will become uninhabitable at the precise moment the human race becomes immortal.”

— Steve Toltz

39. “I couldn’t get my head around it. She’d lied to me! She had lied to me! Me! I was supposed to be the liar in this relationship!”

— Steve Toltz

40. “There’s freedom in looking crazy.”

— Steve Toltz

41. “I don’t have a great respect for reality or getting the ‘facts’ as a means of putting together a story.”

— Steve Toltz

42. “Friendships are an unforseeable burden.”

— Steve Toltz

43. “Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo -.”

— Steve Toltz

44. “Then I started thinking about tears. What was evolution up to when it rendered the human body incapable of concealing sadness? Is it somehow crucial to the survival of the species that we can’t hide our melancholy? Why? What’s the evolutionary benefit of crying? To elicit sympathy? Does evolution have a Machiavellian streak?”

— Steve Toltz

45. “People trust too much in themselves. What they take for truth, they let rule their lives, and if I set out to find a way to live so I will be in control of my life, then I actually lose control, because the thing I have decided on, my truth, becomes the ruler and I become it’s servant. And how can I be free to evolve if I’m submitting myself to a ruler, any ruler, even if that ruler is me?”

— Steve Toltz

46. “Problem is, Jews don’t believe in hell, so there isn’t the same readily accessible chamber of fear the Catholics have up their sleeve to poison the nervous system of their youth. You can’t turn to a young Jewish boy and say, “You see that pit of fire? That’s where you’re going.”

— Steve Toltz

47. “Sometimes I think the human animal doesn’t really need food or water to survive, only gossip.”

— Steve Toltz

48. “I resisted a strong impulse to pluck out my eye and show it to them.”

— Steve Toltz

49. “I had begun to perceive my genitals as imaginary beasts in some epic fourteenth-century Scottish poem.”

— Steve Toltz

50. “That’s what first love is all about. What happens is you meet a love object and immediately a hole inside you starts aching, the hole that is always there but you don’t notice until someone comes along, plugs it up, and then runs away with the plug.”

— Steve Toltz