Quotes from Noah Hawley

Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

But it's about adults. The corruption of adults. This delusion that they can get whatever they want for free. That they can lie needlessly, promise anything, and then cheat the consequences. This is the delusion of power. The belief that power erases the need for honesty. That power in and of itself is a fact that supersedes all other facts. And what is the price they pay, our elders for stiffing the Piper? Their future. Because what is the future, if not children?

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on? A

And so chubby, sugar-brained Jack invented exercise. He became the hero who could do a thousand jumping jacks and a thousand chin-ups in ninety minutes. The muscle that trained itself to finish 1,033 push-ups in twenty minutes by climbing a twenty-five-foot rope with 140 pounds of weight strapped to his belt.

Résumés should have an acknowledgments page, where job applicants thank everyone in their lives who helped them.

You stay home and raise daughters, who grow up and get jobs and then feel pity for you, their stay-at-home mothers.

The lives we live, he thinks, are filled with holes.

But Doug had the same clichéd overreaction to wealth that defined most bearded men his age.

What I believe is irrelevant. In the last year, belief in Bigfoot rose from eleven percent to twenty-five percent. Here's another figure: thirty percent of Americans believe that aliens have visited Earth in the not-too-distant past.

I believe the world lives on the edge between magic and science," he says finally. "And that it tips back and forth, depending on what we believe.

single spark can start an inferno. Or it can flare harmlessly, like a firefly. The difference is oxygen, kindling, and luck.

He was a sorting machine, boxing the news by category and priority, forwarding tips to various departments.

We don't believe in God." "Their god. I'm talking about ours." "We get a god?" "We get the God. And he is mighty and righteous and pissed.

Don't you see? they cried. All we have to do is change.

Self-determination theory," he intones calmly, as if the moderator had never spoken, "states that human beings need three basic things in order to feel content. Number one, they need to feel competent at what they do. Number two, they need to feel authentic in their lives, and number three, they need to feel connected to others.

He swam backward through time, lap after lap, until he was six years old and watching Jack LaLanne tow a thousand-pound boat through San Francisco Bay, until that feeling returned -- that deep boy certainty: Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough. Scott wasn't old, it turned out. He wasn't finished. He had just given up.

Follow the words, not the person.

irony without humor is violence.

They think about that for a moment, how sometimes the only way to learn not to play with fire is to go up in flames.

says to me are upsetting. Extinction. This is what we talk of most. What happens to a species when you destroy its natural habitat, when you corrupt its essential nature and purpose—when you take its biological instincts and mandates and use

The Torah, it should be noted, makes no clear reference to the afterlife whatsoever.

You confuse our higher and lower functions, harnessing our drives and motivating us down an unnatural path, one in which human beings are reprogrammed to covet products and ignore reality.

He told me to tell you that it's hard to be useful and sad.

Dreamers will always dream.