Quotes from Noah Hawley

To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function

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 remain obsessed, even as our bodies move on.

People in power fight to stay in power," says the Prophet. "This is the nature of power.

It's hard to be sad when you're being useful. And

When Bill Cunningham invites him on the air, it is not to set the story straight so the story ends. It is to add a new chapter, a new twist that propels the narrative forward into another week of ratings cycles.

People get up in the morning and they think it's another day. They make plans. They move in a chosen direction. But it's not another day. It's the day their train derails or a tornado touches down or the ferry sinks.

The things money can't buy, goes the famous quote, you don't want anyway. Which is bullshit, because in truth there is nothing money can't buy. Not really. Love, happiness, peace of mind. It's all available for a price. The fact is, there's enough money on earth to make everyone whole, if we could just learn to do what any toddler knows—share. But money,

hears the apartment door close, then the sound of her heels on the staircase. He stands staring at the house on television. Bill Cunningham, looking energized, says: "—movement in an upstairs window

Your author would also like to explain that he didn't want to put all those guns in his story, but this is a story about America. At last count there were more than four hundred and twenty million guns in America (population 330,000,000). This makes America a Chekhov play, in which a gun shown in Act One must be fired in Act Two. In other words, if you think the next act of American life is going to unfold without gunfire, you're not paying attention.

This is who we had become by then, people who gathered in the rain, arguing over whether or not they were getting wet.

And what is adolescence if not a great height from which we are all expected to jump?

Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.

Self-determination theory,' he intones casually, 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. Is there anyone here who feels they can check all three of those boxes?

So many riches. So much power. And all we had to do was decide. Would we cleave together or cleave apart?

Since when does how a thing looks matter more than what it is?

At first I asked myself—why would God talk to me? I'm not special. But then I thought—why not me? Maybe that's the point. What is history if not a mass grave filled with the bodies of followers of Special Men?

We became the commodity. Our data. This is the secret of modern life. We went from being citizens to consumers, and now to commodities. Our personality profiles, our social and financial history, our likes and dislikes, all used to accurately predict future behavior. How will we vote? Will we take to the streets or roll over? The data knows all, which is why today our data is more valuable than our bodies.

crayon, drawing a

Three hours later, she was sitting across from the local sheriff, Jim Peabody, whose face looked like the last piece of jerky in the jar.

This is the lesson we had learned: when you don't want to face the consequences of your actions, you focus on the soap opera of public life, with its heroes and villains, its clear narratives.

You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.

Being without electronics for more than a few hours is like being kidnapped by a cult deprogrammer in a cheap brown suit and taken to a fluorescent motel

It's like living near a bakery but never eating any bread. Every day you walk the streets, the smell of it in your nose, your stomach growling, but no matter how many corners you turn, you can never enter the actual store. The

If he could speak, Simon would have said, Isn't it the job of the strong to protect the weak?