The Nix

by Nathan Hill

“The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”

He wondered why adults felt they needed to be at their most uncomfortable for their most cherished events.

“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “Every memory is really a scar.”

Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger.

He treats love like a balloon, like it is all a very simple matter of accumulation, just adding more air.

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces.

The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower?

We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic.

Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.

She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

That by choosing a few very private concerns and pouring herself into them, she had never felt so expanded. That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice.

“He’s like the most dangerous species of American there is: heterosexual white male who didn’t get what he wanted.”

Don’t rely on other men to help you. Every man in his heart wants you to be raped. Because it confirms your need for his protection.

He had learned something important: What was printed became the truth.

Like wealth tends to build upon itself, so too fame, which is a kind of social wealth, a kind of conceptual abundance.

All places seemed equally horrible because the thing they never mentioned about traveling in your retirement is that in order for it to work you must, at the very least, be able to endure the person you’re traveling with. And he imagined all that time together—on planes, in restaurants, in hotel rooms. They couldn’t escape each other, he and his wife.

How easily a simple façade can become your life, can become the truth of your life.

Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

She knew when a building got a fancy name, insufferable people soon followed.

Why do the best things in life leave such deep scars?

Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.

Something does not have to happen for it to feel real.

“The only people who get famous on their own are serial killers. Everyone else needs people like me.”

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”

Anger was such an easy emotion to feel, the refuge of someone who didn’t want to work too hard.

Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.

Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.