Nickolas Butler > Quotes

“In all my travels, only in the Midwest would someone spend their money in a place they hate simply because they feel bad for the proprietors. Also I suppose, because they know your name.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“America, I think, is about poor people playing music and poor people sharing food and poor people dancing, even when everything else in their life is so desperate, and so dismal that it doesn't seem there should be any room for any music, any extra food, or any extra energy for dancing. And people can say that I'm wrong, that we're a puritanical people, an evangelical people, a selfish people, but I don't believe that. I don't want to believe that.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“When he talked politics, it was with me, or my sister, pointing a steady and patient finger at us, saying, “I don’t care about left or right. It’s all nonsense. All I ask of you is this: Be kind. Be decent. And don’t be greedy.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“Sometimes that is what forgiveness is anyway, a deep sigh”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“This is my home. This is the place that first believed in me. That still believes in me.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“Winter in Wisconsin is the ideal time to avoid someone because our garments grow ever larger, ever thicker, and we go about the frozen world insulated beneath knit caps and mittens, our feet clad in mukluks or boots.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“First of all, I want you to think of the city as a collection of people. That's easy, right? You think of Minneapolis or Chicago or Milwaukee, you think of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people. That's what you think of right away. Maybe you think of sky-scrapers too, I don't know. But I think of people. The next thing you should think about is ideas. Think of each of those millions of people as a set of ideas. Like, That woman is a ballerina, she thinks about ballet. Or, that man is an architect, he thinks about buildings. If you begin thinking about it that way, a city is the greatest place in the world. It's millions of people, brushing up against one another, exchanging ideas, all the time, at every hour of the day.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“Here, I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“I've known cowards and I've known heroes," he says. "The heroes were always ruled by their hearts; the cowards by their brains. Don't forget that. Heroes don't calculate or calibrate. They do what is right.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“Part of being a parent is loving your child more than they'll ever love you.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“Sing like you've got no audience, sing like you don't know what a critic is, sing about your hometown, sing about your prom, sing about deer, sing about the seasons, sing about your mother, sing about chainsaws, sing about the thaw, sing about the rivers, sing about forests, sing about the prairies. But whatever you do, start singing early in the morning, if only just to keep warm. And if you happen to live in a warm beautiful place …

Move to Wisconsin. Buy a wood stove, and spend a week splitting wood. It worked for me.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“It’s all been worth it. Every fight, all those years of childish experimentation, the occasional heartbreak, the paltry checking account, the used, old trucks. To have lived with another human being, another person, this man, as long as I have, and to see him change and grow. To see him become more decent and more patient, stronger and more competent—to see how he loves our children—how he wrestles with them on the floor and kisses them unabashedly in public. To hear his voice in the evening, reading books to them, or explaining to them what his father was like while he was alive, or what I was like as a girl, a teenager, a young woman. To hear him explain why our part of the world is so special.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“as I watched their approach I wondered whether the slow pace of a wedding march was for the benefit of a bride on her most beautiful day, or for the aging father preparing to give her away.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“I live here, I have chosen to live here, because life seems real to me here.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“Part of being a parent is loving your child more than they'll ever love you.... It's true. You'll see someday. You'll see.
The heaviest thing in the world is the coffin that carries the weight of a little child, for no adult who has ever borne that burden will ever forget it. To bury a child is a tragedy many parents never overcome.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“No, the safest thing is to become an island. To make your house a citadel against all the garbage and ugliness in the world. How else can you be sure of anything?”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“He cared not for politics; he’d lived long enough to watch every politician he once admired become an abject disappointment, if not a liar.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“It's all been worth it. Every fight, all those years of childish experimentation, the occasional heartbreak, the paltry checking account, the used, old trucks. To have lived with another human being, another person, this man, as long as I have and to see him change and grow.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“Goddamn golf shirts and gym memberships and fake muscles and tans and cell phones and new cars. Trevor didn't care about any of that garbage. All he wanted was a garden. Isn't that funny?”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“America is the greatest country in the world, his father always used to tell him, as long as you don't run out of money.”
― Nickolas Butler, Godspeed

“I do not relish leaving home, leaving my children, leaving the familiarity of my bed, my coffee maker, my slippers, but I do love hotels.”
― Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs

“I hate this Christmas song,” Lyle said at last, turning off the radio. “You don’t like John Lennon?” Peg asked, trying to stifle a small laugh. “It’s just that, only John Lennon could write a Christmas song that made you feel like a fool for ever liking Christmas at all. Paul McCartney would never do that. Or George or Ringo, for that matter.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“The world is composed of people who are hungry, and those who are not hungry. It goes back to energy, to entropy. If you are hungry for food, you will be hungry for God, too. Or politics, or some kind of love. The people who are hungry have holes in them that can't be filled. Don't get me wrong. I've seen starving people at peace with the world. I've been in villages where starving people gave me their supper. Food doesn't have anything to do with it; it's about the deeper kind of hunger, those holes.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“How much easier was it not to change at all, to simply dwell in the comfortable little eddy time had carved away for her in this old river town? Or was there something to letting go? Letting go and drifting into the current, down and away from that eddy and into gliding waters she could not predict.”
― Nickolas Butler, A Forty Year Kiss: A Novel

“The way he loved was almost like a vise, a weight; at times she felt it verged on codependence--that his identity, his value system, all of it very much hinged on her.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“something desperate, something ecstatic, some transference of, yes, energy”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“I never understood organized religion," Otis said at length. "Be a good person. Don't hurt other folks. Don't cheat. Don't be greedy. That seems pretty straightforward to me. I don't need a goddamn guidebook to stay on the straight and narrow. Or a set of stones engraved by lightening. Or some heavenly reward. I don't need a particular day of the week set aside. All of our days are important, every last one. You get older, that comes into tighter and tighter focus.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“no one, in his experience, behaved very rationally once the thermometer tipped beyond ninety degrees.”
― Nickolas Butler, Little Faith

“only”
― Nickolas Butler, A Forty Year Kiss: A Novel

“and read the books that always seem to Jenga up on her bedside table without her managing to actually read them”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men