Medallion Status Quotes

“becomes self-evident to any parent that the pain of loving and caring for another thing is better than the ease of not. I will admit even fur parents know this secret. Parenthood begins as an expression of narcissism, of personal genetic redoubling; but that selfishness is quickly burned away in the crucible of tears, vomit, fevers, and close calls; and it is repaid only in the incalculable joy of seeing someone else thrive in happiness and apart from you. You disappear, and it is a fucking relief.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“The Sky Lounge is not aspirational. It is desperational.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Hipsterism is the purposeful cultivation of uncool and esoteric tastes, and sometimes a shortcut to that aesthetic is to embrace the ugly.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Whatever you may have thought about Hillary Clinton, my daughter watched as a highly experienced and qualified woman lost a job to a neophyte dilettante cartoon character of a white man who openly bragged of molesting women. My daughter isn’t dumb. She got the message.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“It takes a long time for white guys to appreciate that they are breakable. They do not live from birth with the daily fear that they might be attacked or detained or killed. Their bodies are not constant targets of power. Their bodies are power, so they throw those bodies up and down mountains and stairs and out of airplanes and into pointless online yelling matches for fun. They just presume they will survive.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“These violent delights will have violent ends!” My son didn’t get the Westworld reference.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“For some people, status is what protects them from oblivion. And when they feel their status is slipping away from them, they act fearfully, irrationally.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“My comedy, such as it is, had always been based on taking existing fact and stretching it out to its most absurd possible iteration. But Donald Trump was already doing that. He had been doing it his whole life. By the time he launched his actual, no-joke presidential campaign by gliding down a golden escalator to accuse Mexico of rape, I had realized that there was no joke I could make that could keep up with the long-form improv Trump was laying down every hour of every day. Because of course we now know the no-joke campaign was a joke. He never expected to actually be elected. He just wanted to launch this new, lucrative hate-and-fear-based entertainment product called the Trump Candidacy. But then he became president, and the joke was on him, because he did not want that job. But the joke was still mostly on us, because he is terrible at it, and he makes us all a laughingstock”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Donald Trump was appearing on cable news channels to peddle conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s religion and place of birth. It was 2011. The Apprentice was winding down and struggling. Like anyone, Donald Trump wanted to stay on television, so he was trying out some new ways of doing so, such as musing about running for president and/or just wandering onto cable news sets to tell obvious lies without any credentials other than that he was a (supposedly) rich white man who wanted to talk right now.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Everyone is doing what they have to do, and everyone is doing the best they can. And soon you will be going home.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Philadelphia is called “The City of Brotherly Love,” which is a lie. Philadelphia is not a nice city.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“My favorite kind of science fiction is post-apocalyptic dystopia. But I just heard at the bar that genre is going out of style. Frankly, that’s not a future I want to live in.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“A public road had been closed to us so that a rich man could watch the Super Bowl in his playhouse and show his rich friends the nuclear football.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“success does not mean you cannot be tricked.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“I grew to really love the exquisite humiliation of auditioning. When you audition for a role, everything is organized around reminding you that you do not matter. It’s the best therapy I ever received.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“that the secret to my implausible, financially self-sufficient adulthood was the same secret that had brought me here: I was invited to do something, and I said yes. It is better to say yes than no. Unless saying yes will hurt you or someone else, say yes. Don’t say no if the invitation is scary. That’s when you should definitely say yes. If a computer company invites you to be in an ad and you’re scared to say yes because (a) it will mess up your pickup schedule at your child’s school and (b) it will push you well past your comfortable limits of fraudulency and change your life forever, take it from me, don’t say no, like I did, and then get lucky only because they asked again. They won’t always ask again. And don’t say no, like I did, to appearing on Breaking Bad because you were afraid to live in Albuquerque for a while, away from your family. Do your work. Do the things you love. Don’t ask permission. The more work you make in the world, the more likely someone will ask you to do some new thing, some bigger thing, or at least some interesting thing. And when they ask, say yes.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“when you are shooting a television show, time is more important than any one performance. If you are doing a bad job at acting, I had learned, they will not bother to tell you. That would be a waste of time, and it might put you into an emotional hole that would also waste time. And by the same token, I had learned that when they say you have done a good job at acting, they are probably lying.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“these moments you wonder what you are teaching their kids, and your own. Then you realize you are teaching them the truth about America.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Do your work. Do the things you love. Don’t ask permission. The more work you make in the world, the more likely someone will ask you to do some new thing, some bigger thing, or at least some interesting thing. And when they ask, say yes.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“It is better to say yes than no. Unless saying yes will hurt you or someone else, say yes. Don’t say no if the invitation is scary. That’s when you should definitely say yes.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“And you are forced to say, "No. I have to get back to my family. This is the most convenient time for me to have him poisoned." And you know you are a monster after all, a sick animal that no one has the decency to put down.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“I told him there is no Words with Friends in this life: there is only Scrabble, with enemies.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“There is little I like more than a steam tray full of breakfast sausages - ask anyone - and craft services is very good on this account.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“I enjoy being seen and recognized. So many people go through life without being seen or recognized at all, not even by their own families. So I know what a gift it is.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“But even though we were all horrifying reminders of our own mortality, it was nice to see my old, crumbling friends.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“the acting profession itself is precisely and endlessly this: waiting in a room for your name to be called. And then you hear your name, and they take you through the blank door into the room.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“cat’s feelings, and neither do you. It is not your pet anymore. It is an asshole who lives with you.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“You are sleeping and farting and snorting and flaking and puking in close proximity, and there is no way to hide all of these sounds and smells from your beloved. You see your partner unhinge their jaw to say the worst things, or shed their disgusting skin to become something new, and you have to accept and forgive these things. A marriage, like a python, is expensive.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Single people who don’t get pets in their twenties have to do other things to pretend they are grown-ups, like get married.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms

“Single people get pets in their twenties because it feels like a grown-up thing to do. You have a job now. Maybe you have an apartment of your own, or a room in one, that you can fill with your grown-up idea of art and music. You don’t have money, but you learn to roast a chicken and invite your broke friends around your rickety side table for a fake grown-up dinner, pouring wine and mashed potatoes on top of your fear that you don’t know what you’re doing and never will. And you get a pet.”
― John Hodgman, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms