Top 40 Tim Kreider Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

— Tim Kreider

2. “One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.”

— Tim Kreider

3. “Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him.”

— Tim Kreider

4. “The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.”

— Tim Kreider

5. “The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox.”1 A.”

— Tim Kreider

6. “Life is too short to be busy.”

— Tim Kreider

7. “I still feel at home in Baltimore in a way I will never feel anywhere else – part of the definition of home being a place you don’t belong anymore.”

— Tim Kreider

8. “When somebody tells us something that would be disturbing or inconvenient for us to believe, we reflexively scrutinize that.”

— Tim Kreider

9. “We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.”

— Tim Kreider

10. “The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.”

— Tim Kreider

11. “Of course time doesn’t stop for anyone; alcohol just keeps you from feeling it, the way it’ll keep a man cozy while he freezes to death.”

— Tim Kreider

12. “This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are.”

— Tim Kreider

13. “We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we take out to treasure only rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.”

— Tim Kreider

14. “I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”

— Tim Kreider

15. “At such times we are certainly not at our best but we are undeniably at our most human – utterly vulnerable, naked and laid open, a mess. Whenever.”

— Tim Kreider

16. “The problem is that most of us hated school. His fallacy was much the same as progressivism’s: the assumption that if he could just explain the facts clearly, build a convincing enough argument, eventually everyone would come around to his conclusion. But people aren’t interested in lectures; they want to hear stories. Which is why the right holds the demagogic advantage over the left in America; they tell a simpler, more satisfying story.”

— Tim Kreider

17. “It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.”

— Tim Kreider

18. “A friend of mine reports that all the women he’s polled have been enthusiastic advocates of the bold romantic gesture, but this, he suspects, is because they’re all picturing John Cusack making it, not Steve Buscemi or Peter Lorre or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Often you don’t know whether you’re the hero of a romantico comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.”

— Tim Kreider

19. “Compared with Baltimore, New York feels like a city-themed theme park. The difference between the two places is the difference between affectation and insanity, the eccentric and the grotesque.”

— Tim Kreider

20. “Young people don’t say the new normal anymore; to them it’s just normal. But I guess no one finds themselves in the same country they were born in at the ends of their lives. We all die in exile.”

— Tim Kreider

21. “God, how I long to go out west again someday – to drive some blue highway in Nevada or Utah until there’s absolutely nothing around me, then stop the car, in the middle of the road, maybe, and get out and just stand there, where I can see from one horizon to the other, and smell the air and feel the sun and listen to the silence of the desert. I have this idea that if I could do this, time might hold still for a second, and I would know, for just a moment, what it feels like to be here.”

— Tim Kreider

22. “It’s always a sad revelation when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that, for them, your friendship was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don’t need you anymore. There.”

— Tim Kreider

23. “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration – it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

— Tim Kreider

24. “The smell of hospitals is like small talk at a funeral – you know its function is to cover up something else.”

— Tim Kreider

25. “Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.”

— Tim Kreider

26. “Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.”

— Tim Kreider

27. “I’m afraid most people choose political parties based on the same question they ask about regular parties: Who else is going to be there?”

— Tim Kreider

28. “It turns out that when there is some conspicuous gap or contradiction at the center of someone’s existence, there is probably a very specific, obvious reason for it, and the reason you’re avoiding confronting it directly is that it’s something you don’t want to know.”

— Tim Kreider

29. “The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play.”

— Tim Kreider

30. “The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts.”

— Tim Kreider

31. “People are most vociferously opposed to those forces they have to resist more fiercely within themselves.”

— Tim Kreider

32. “His professed philosophy of “Shandyism” is a defiant frivolity that declines to take the world as seriously as it tries to insist upon. In.”

— Tim Kreider

33. “You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever – or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.”

— Tim Kreider

34. “The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economy system.”

— Tim Kreider

35. “Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if I’d been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I would’ve been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate.”

— Tim Kreider

36. “Perhaps the reason we so often experience happiness only in hindsight, and that any deliberate campaign to achieve it is so misguided, is that it isn’t an obtainable goal in itself but only an artereffect. It’s the consequence of having lived in the way that we’re supposed to – by which I don’t mean ethically correct but fully, consicously engaged in the business of living.”

— Tim Kreider

37. “The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories.”

— Tim Kreider

38. “What I could relate to was the common fear that you are secretly so uniquely screwed-up that there is no way anyone would like you if they really knew you.”

— Tim Kreider

39. “Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people – if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are – you may have lost perspective.”

— Tim Kreider

40. “How it could make Diana happy to be around me was mysterious to me, since I was always around me and I was never happy. We always forget the Heisenberg effect of our own presence – that we only ever get to see what other people are like when we’re around. I’d been drawn to her hoping I might absorb some of her radiance, not realizing it was, in part, my own reflected light. 197.”

— Tim Kreider

41. “The only flaw in this plan is that I would then be insane. 88.”

— Tim Kreider

42. “The last thing I’d want to be accused of is “growing up”; this is how boring conventional people congratulate you when your spirit breaks. 173.”

— Tim Kreider

43. “I wonder whether this same fear isn’t beneath our twenty-first-century intolerance for waits and downtime and silence. It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming. So instead we keep ourselves perpetually stunned with stimuli, thereby missing out on the very thing we’re so scared of losing.”

— Tim Kreider

44. “Maybe the moral is, nothing works. 98.”

— Tim Kreider

45. “So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have this same tone of thrilled vindication: these are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it.”

— Tim Kreider