Harrison Scott Key > Quotes

“Every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“The South is a strange place, one that can't be fit inside a movie, a place that dares you to simplify it, like a prime number, like a Bible story, like my father.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself, and your inborn desire to shape the world to your will like some kind of Marvel villain.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I loved being a stay-at-home mom but no one prepares you for how lonely it is.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“In one terrible instant, that terrible thing happened, the single most tragic experience of my, and just about any, childhood: boredom.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“Genesis never disappoints, crammed as it is with nudity, murder, and many delicious set pieces involving nudity and murder, in addition to DIY boatbuilding instructions.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“One of your greatest misconceptions, the one you must jettison as soon as is convenient to you, is that you’re easy to live with. You’re not. You’re a monster.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I firmly believe that all human families are full of crazy people, and if your family doesn’t appear to have any, then there’s a high probability you lack situational awareness. I’ve”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“Before he got famous for being a sexual degenerate, Louis C.K. said this dumb thing about marriage: 'Divorce is always good news because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.' The reality is that every marriage is a partnership of two broken assholes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver. Marriage is as much a mystery to me now as the origins of the universe and the laws that govern the behavior of matter. What makes one work is just as strange as what makes one not. But I possess more information now than I had when this all began. We both do. Lauren has had to come to terms with some difficult truths, such as how her husband has grown a mustache, and I have had to grapple with other truths, such as how my wife left me for the human equivalent of Diet Mountain Dew.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I once attempted to flirt with her our freshman year of college, complimenting her sandals before class. She didn't respond, just glared at me with a scowl that would've liquefied helium, for which I repaid her many years later by marrying into her family and sitting next to her every Thanksgiving.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Perhaps one day we will evolve ourselves into some better arrangement for the children, where benevolent armies of solar-powered robots raise children on expansive baby farms, but until Elon funds this nightmare, marriage is what we’ve got. It’s good for us and it’s good for the kids, even when it hurts like hell. I think often of our daughters and what they have learned of love in this strange season. I suppose we’ve given them enough trauma to turn all three into artists or writers, or at least law students. But we’re here, all of us: a nuclear family, detonated but not destroyed. We won’t be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We’ll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“We won’t be traumatizing our children with our divorce. We’ll traumatize them with our marriage, as God intended.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“The South is a strange place, one that can’t be fit inside a movie, a place that dares you to simplify it, like a prime number, like a Bible story, like my father.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“When you trim your own hedges, you learn a lot about your home, and what you learn is that your property is aggressively and continually doing the opposite of what you would prefer: gutters stop, eaves rot, crabgrass runs riot, feral cats colonize crawl spaces for their fun cat orgies.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I think I'm going to start seeing other women,' I said to my best friend, Mark, one day, over the phone, updating him on the magical adventure of my marital separation.

'Are you sure that's a good idea?'

'No. But I need some way to get Lauren off my mind.'

'Have you tried alcoholism?”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“He’d throw the kids as high as he could in the air. Why do dads do this? It’s a global problem.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“His greatest lesson was the one he never said out loud, the thing a father should do, which is this: Be there. Always be there. And never stop being there, until you can’t be there anymore. “Hey,”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“As a young man, the book of Leviticus was easy to mock, all the evidence you needed of God’s pettiness, but after reading CDC recommendations for the reopening of schools, Leviticus now felt familiar, whole chapters devoted to reminding people to wash their hands.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“My wife was a riddle. I think all women are. Men are not riddles, even the smart ones. We are independent clauses, such as: “I like meat.” “Water feel good.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“You pay pros to clean your teeth and replace your brake shoes. Why won’t you pay someone to give your marriage a little more mileage, too?”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“Compatibility is an accomplishment of marriage, not a prerequisite.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“But having people meet my family was a secret fear. It would be like taking someone to a dark room to show them my anal fissures, and you can't just go introducing everybody to your anal fissures. Only special people get to see such as that.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“But books were full of stories and stories were full of lies and lies hurt Jesus's feelings, so I didn't know what to think. I blamed my family. They were the ones who taught me so much about telling stories, and how not to do it, and then, in inspired moments of surprise, how to tell one so good you forgot what day it was, and I liked forgetting what day it was, so I made certain life choices that would allow me to get paid to forget what day it was and teach others to forget what day it was, which is, after all, what I think heaven probably is: the whole world, forgetting what day it is. You have to, I bet, with an endless supply of them.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“But now, I don't feel silly. I just feel a rush of something up through my heart, wide and deep as a river of light, and it rushes over the banks, and up through the throat and into the mouth and out my eyes, a great big surge of something that for so long had no name, a fugitive animal in a wood, and I know the name of it now, and what it is, is love.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man

“Laying up treasures in heaven is what my grandmother would’ve called it, when good people do good things because God is watching and remembering.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“the master bedrooms of married people always made me uneasy. I was afraid I’d see things that cannot be unseen, such as tubs of Vaseline or some sort of agricultural harness.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“Pop was a devoted father, a large and powerful man who showered us with guns and love. He did not drink, or hit our mother; his only luxury the occasional heart attack.”
― Harrison Scott Key, The World's Largest Man: A Memoir

“Back then, I had a taste for science fantasy stories where humanoid aliens made love to brave earthlings in distant galaxies, which I knew might upset Jesus, if he was real, though it could hardly be called a sin, as all this reading greatly improved my vocabulary with words and phrases like 'orifice' and 'erogenous tentacle.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“I did not want to be here. This is a chronic theme of my life, obediently agreeing to be somewhere and upon arrival very much wishing my head would miraculously burst into flames so that I could be hauled away by medical professionals.”
― Harrison Scott Key, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

“For most of human history, these children's career options would have been much simpler, back when you did whatever your parents did, which was usually to die of typhoid.”
― Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?