A Working Theory of Love Quotes

“When you spend significant amounts of time with someone they offer constant feedback, becoming part of the patterning of your brain. In other words, part of you. But I take your point -- constant feedback is not always deep feedback. A good measure of how much of you they've become is your level of distress when they're gone. If they form a large measure of your patterning, then you'll experience a major culling of the self. That's what's known as grief.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“Not everyone's life will be a great love story.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“We are all, of course, wayfaring strangers on this earth. But coming out of the rainbow tunnel, the liminal portal between Marin and San Francisco, myth and reality, I catch sight of a beautiful, sparkling city that might as well be on the moon. I can name the sights, the streets, the eateries, but in my heart it feels as unfamiliar as Cape Town or Cuzco. I've lived here for fourteen years. This is the arena of my adult life, with its large defeats and small victories. Maybe, like all transplants (converts?), I've asked too much of the city. I would never have moved to Pittsburh or Houston or L.A. expecting it to save my soul. Only here in the great temple by the bay. It's a mistake we've been making for decades, and probably a necessary one. The city's flaws, of course, are numerous. Our politics can suffer from humourless stridency, and life here is menacingly expensive. But if you're insulated from these concerns, sufficiently employed and housed, if you are -in other words- like most people, you are in view of the unbridgeable ideal. Here, with our plentiful harvest, our natural beauty, our bars, our bookstores, our cliffs and ocean, out free to be you and me; here, where pure mountain water flows right out of the tap. It's here that the real questions become inescapable. In fact the proximity of the ideal makes us more acutely aware of the real questions. Not the run-of-the-mill insolubles-Why am I here? Who am I?- but the pressing questions of adult life: Really? and Are you sure? And Now what?”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“I never forgot the way she looked; I just forgot that I knew.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“It’s important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We’re both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone’s strawberries. We’re open to innovation. We’re open to new ideas. We’re open to odd couples—and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy’s niece. Anything can happen.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“Opinions are like ugly children … despite it all you love your own.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“It's just I get this feeling -- and I can't believe I'm telling you this -- but I get this feeling that life with him will be really, really good, but that I'm not a key part of that. You could take me out of the equation, replace me with someone else, and it would be the same equation.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“The problem with epiphanies is the next day they feel like they happened to someone else. Inspiration will get you nowhere in life.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“Artists are always the Johnny Appleseeds of gentrification.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“I know already that I can survive it. That's the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I'll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the worst?”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“I remain exquisitely still. Anytime the eagle of another heart soars, whatever you are-mouse, toad, snake- don't move. From such great heights, it might not see you.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“What happened to us American men? There we were, joyfully plundering the world like openhanded pirates, and now that we have it all we sit in half-lotus on the edge of paradise, the most beautiful country in the most beautiful state in the luckiest country under the sun, to meditate on loss and resentment.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“She was completely inside herself, and I realized I'd never seem her that way- unknowable and unknown. Exactly the way I felt. It seemed confirmation we were made for each other, however painfully.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“Montana is the hostess, a pretty, pleasantly blank-looking high-school-age girl. It’s not profound blankness—just the vacancy of youth. A certain position of the head, a set of the eyes, all of which can be transformed by twenty-two or twenty-five or twenty-seven, her eyes sharper, head tilted down into life, ready for impact. She just needs something terrible to happen to her, and then needs to do something terrible to someone else. After that, she’s all set.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“The architecture—the mind—is knitting together. It’s sentience. Vague sentience. All these years of formulating machines that know something, while the secret is to create machines that don’t know something.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“She wants another spin on the wheel of fortune? This was always my problem with her: I could never tell the difference between the feeling of love and the feeling of danger.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love

“Outside it dawned on me that my mother hadn't specified the method of my father's suicide. She'd just said he'd committed suicide. It seemed horrible to me that I hadn't thought to ask. I decided not to pack. I had clothes in my bedroom at home. I still lived there, in a sense. I hadn't planned on coming home for the summer. He'd been mad about that, I thought. Or had he? I'd reached a point where I couldn't tell if he was mad about everything, or nothing, or wasn't mad at all.”
― Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love