Wellness Quotes

“She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“And the only thing she was certain of was this: that between ourselves and the world are a million stories, and if we don’t know which among them are true, we might as well try out those that are most humane, most generous, most beautiful, most loving.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Maybe the human heart was just that messy, and all romance was deeply precarious, and the future was unresolved, and that was fine. Maybe that’s what true love actually was: an embrace of the chaotic unfolding. And maybe the only stories that had neat and certain conclusions were lies and fables and conspiracies. Maybe it was like Dr. Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“reality could be created by the stories you believed, and thus it was important to pick the right stories.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“It is an odd feeling, to sense one’s aliveness, for perhaps the very first time, to understand that life up until this point was not being lived, exactly; it was being endured.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Every couple has a story they tell themselves about themselves, a story that hums beneath them as a kind of engine, motoring them through trouble and into the future.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“And other people’s attention feels exhausting because their expectations come across as an impossible obligation.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“When I see people on Facebook express their loud inflexible certainty about some political thing, what I believe they’re actually saying is I am in great pain, and nobody is paying attention. This is also true for people who believe deeply in soulmates, like, say, your husband. What Jack really needs is the illusion of certainty, the illusion that he will never be hurt again.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Here, Elizabeth thought, was an answer for her strange new client. How could United Airlines make its customers happy with a below-average experience? By making the experience much, much worse, and making people voluntarily choose to endure it. This was the solution! Make the seats even narrower, the lines even longer, the competition for overhead space even more cutthroat—make it all famously bad and then tell people that they could avoid all of it and have a more or less normally below-average experience for a modest fee. Thus, if they knew beforehand that the experience would be dreadful but they didn’t pay the fee to avoid it, they would be less unhappy about the dreadful experience because, ultimately, they chose to have it. They did it to themselves. It”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“the perfect placebo, she suddenly understood, was choice. If you chose to do something, you would endure all manner of mistreatment and still tell yourself: This was the right choice.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Beyond all the poetry, beyond all the songs, love is this, my dear: it’s an expansion of the self. It’s when the boundaries of the self spread out to include someone else, and what used to be them now becomes you.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“And didn’t Jack do the same thing? He needed Elizabeth so much, and that need was plainly suffocating her. He was so fearful of losing her that he’d choked the life right out of their marriage. Evelyn had tried to teach him this very lesson, a long time ago. She’d told him: When you cling too hard to what you want, you miss what’s really there.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“This, it turned out, was the most savage, most hurtful thing about being a parent: it wasn’t just coming face-to-face with all your own shortcomings and inadequacies, but it was also seeing those shortcomings embodied in your child.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“people revealed themselves constantly, but unconsciously, and in the very smallest of ways.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“And what you do when you are making big mistakes is find other people to make them with you.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Marriage, my dear, is a condition whereby you find so many qualities within another person that you want to have within you that you’re willing to take on their flaws, which will, by extension, also be within you, for life.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“And now people were watching other people watching other people play video games. It was like a Darwin fish parade of sloth.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“His mourning was so fully woven into him that he wasn’t entirely sure who he was without it. It was an everyday weight, pulling him down to this one awful fact anytime he strayed too far from it:”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“But marriage promises consistency, certainty: you will be loved forever. And the moment we become certain of this is the moment it begins to slip away from us. Our certainty blinds us to how the world changes and changes and changes.” “So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves. And this saddened him. He”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them. So he says, ‘Yes I believe you,’ and she smiles. She stretches. She touches his face, and makes it splendid.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“This weird and precious and private family thing becomes something altogether new when alchemized by Facebook—it gains a second, uglier entendre. It becomes instrumental. Toby becomes a prop. The whole thing turns into an ad. Such is the inexorable mathematics of Facebook: whatever goes on Facebook just becomes more like Facebook.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“I want to update it. I want to beta test new models. I want to break it and start all over. The way I think of it is: marriage is just a technology that was never quite future-proof. Like, it may have been a good tool in Victorian England or whatever. But for us? Now? Not so much. We have these twenty-first-century relationships running eighteenth-century software. So it’s glitchy and it crashes all the time. Typically with any technology we try to innovate and update and improve it, but with marriage we seem to refuse all progress. We’ve convinced ourselves that, actually, we like all those glitches.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“immediately, how any task other than keeping Toby safe, keeping Toby healthy, seemed like a diversion, or an interruption. She understood with some remorse that if one of her childless friends insisted on coming over during bedtime for martinis and conversation, it wouldn’t feel exactly unwelcome, but it would feel a little irrelevant. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain but then stopping for tea. She realized that her old friends had not abandoned her, or at least had not done so in any volitional way; it was just that their attention had been seized, their love redirected, the purpose of each day reoriented, unavoidably and involuntarily. She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“It's an altogether manic and ceaseless conversation, a conversation that feels sometimes like falling down stairs, barely keeping upright, taken by gravity, skipping, grasping, and then somehow landing, magically on one's feet, intact and triumphant.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“They are both in Chicago to become orphans”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“And this happened all over, in every working group, idiosyncratic professors from two dozen academic departments all fighting for explicit mission-statement representation. So, in the end, it was pretty easy to understand why the mission statement came out looking the way it did: a compound-complex, multi-semicoloned, many-branching grammatical nightmare that forced the English department to stage a collective symbolic walkout when the faculty senate approved it. Since”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness