Quotes from Noah Hawley

Deep down, it seemed, many Americans were convinced that a gain for others was a loss for themselves.

For a time it seemed their marriage would be just another houseplant that had failed to thrive, choked to death by the lack of money and the death of dreams

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble?

We are all victims of our brains. They tell us to do things and we do them. They tell us to believe things and we believe them. They hide our blind spots from us. All the while we believe we are making choices.

As an engineer, he finds the act of art beyond him. The idea that the object itself: canvas, wood and oil is not the point. And that instead, some intangible experience created from the suggestion -- from the intersection of materials, colors, and content has been created. Art exists not inside the piece itself, but inside the mind of the viewer.

It takes—I don't know—optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what's the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?" "There's a name for that," she says. "It's called depression.

He was a skinny, mop-haired boy up from San Marcos with haunted eyes. He wooed her with strange animal facts. The Texas horned lizard, he said, shoots blood out of its eyes when threatened, up to five feet. He was a fount of facts like these. Did you know, he would say, that when the hairy frog is attacked, it breaks its own toe bones and forces them through its skin to make claws?

The signs were everywhere, it seemed. What it meant depended on which god you worshipped. The God of Denial, the God of Revenge, the God of Beauty, Prosperity, Youth. All shared the same name—God will lift you up. God will strike you down!—but it wasn't possible that White Supremacist Jesus and Civil Rights Jesus were the same person, that splash a pregnant woman with blood Jesus and turn the other cheek Jesus were even the same species of deity.

Though the language spoken here appears to be the same, the meaning of each word can be vastly different. What they mean when they say freedom. What they mean when they say equal. What they mean when they say fair.

And James was a believer in mystery. Not like his mum, who never met a phantasmagorical ideology she didn't embrace instantly and completely, but in the manner of Albert Einstein, who once said, "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.

He had been young once and limitless, and then somehow his life became a foregone conclusion. An almost was, not even a has been.

Our house is on fire.

Either we prevent 1.5 degrees [Celsius] of warming or we don't.

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 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?

Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you. And then it's over.

Of the true mysteries of the universe . . . the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. This is the underlying subject of all fiction--Who ARE you, and why are you different from me?--from a NYT Book Review review of Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane

Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.

Here's something else Einstein said: "The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Life can paralyze us, freeze us into statues if we think about things too long.

Everyone has their path. The choices they've made. How any two people end up in the same place at the same time is a mystery. You

Fathers, on the other hand, were there to toughen children up, to say Walk it off when mothers would hold them if they fell. Mothers were the carrot. Fathers were the stick.

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world--sights, sounds, smells--into coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble? Hailstones on a tin roof....What happens when your life can't be translated into a linear narrative?

As his wife she was irrevocably tied to him—his opinions were her opinions. They reflected poorly on her, perhaps not because she held them exactly, but because by choosing Ben, by sticking with him, she showed herself (in the eyes of others) to be a poor judge of character. Though

Today was Friday, August 21.