The Hearts of Men Quotes

“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

“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

“Chicago: "where the great Lake Michigan shines on and on, every rolling wave a sparkling phalanx of freshwater foam hustling on to crash against the shore”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“Sometimes,” he begins quietly, “I think you get mixed up in something, and it’s like stepping into a river. The current takes you and the next thing you know, you’re swimming . . .” He stands up fully and is gone, the flaps undulating behind him like green canvas curtains.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“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

“Someone possessed with hunger, with a thought, with a craving, with a perversion, someone who needs their drug, someone who comes to your door in the middle of the night--they won't have light in their eyes. And that's how you know. That's what I look for. I don't look at their mouths. People lie with their mouths. I look at their eyes.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“The world is full of bad men, but if you are prepared, and if you are STRONG, then you cannot be taken off guard, and you will not be scared. And when they DO come to your door in the middle of the night and you are there to greet them with all the light there is inside you, all the strength, they are the ones who will run for the shadows. And I've SEEN it.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“The world, it seems, does not much care anymore if you are an Eagle Scout, or even a Tenderfoot. It's all about how many "followers" you have, the perfection of your spray-tanned abs; whether you had the genius to sell a start-up company that hasn't produced a single viable product.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“He was righteous. He had a sense of duty, of what was right and wrong in the world, and I don't mean that in some evangelical sense of the word. And I don't mean that his world was just black and white. He just had a code, you know? He used to talk about that, about how few people had CODES anymore. It was his thing. He was always reading books about the samurai, about Japanese culture.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“Corn might be the epidemic that kills us, but I've always loved staring at a big field of it, perfectly planted.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“Nothing patronizing, nothing sexist--just a slightly outdated politeness, and the general regard it might suggest.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“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

“Kids keep you young...But Christ, they make you feel old, too.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“It feels like she's having some very sophisticated sleepover with her spiritual sensei or guru. She has always avoided the term LIFE COACH, finding it utterly pathetic. You need a coach to live? To help you live? Get up in the morning?”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“there seems an atmosphere everywhere these days in America, a malevolent vibration in the air, every citizen so quick to righteous rage, some tribal defensiveness, seeing the fault in each other's arguments, rather than some larger common field of compromise, if not agreement.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“her pace quickens, like a girl visiting a beloved grandparent or uncle. How right he was. She is suddenly aware of her need for adult interaction, a good honest conversation.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“It is especially on such nights that a person should not be left alone.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“This is the air of someone manning a backwater security checkpoint, a jaded receptionist, a disgruntled cashier or tollbooth operator--their power at once minuscule and ultimately final.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“He is a particular kind of Wisconsinite, she understands. The world is a bullet train that has passed him by so quickly, it's as if he's standing on the side of the tracks spinning like a weather vane.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

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

“Politics? Check out a book on thermodynamics. All the rules apply. What you're talking about is essentially energy, or the absence of energy. Because in most cases, political power is totally congruent with energy, with heat.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men

“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

“It was the first time in her life that she considered clothing as a method of camoflaging our scars, the traumas of our lives.”
― Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men