Nickolas Butler Quotes

I live here, I have chosen to live here, because life seems real to me here.

I've known cowards and I've known heroes," he says. "The heroes were always ruled by their hearts; the cowards by their brains. Don't forget that. Heroes don't calculate or calibrate. They do what is right.

When he talked politics, it was with me, or my sister, pointing a steady and patient finger at us, saying, "I don't care about left or right. It's all nonsense. All I ask of you is this: Be kind. Be decent. And don't be greedy.

Here, I can hear things, the world throbs differently, silence thrums like a chord strummed eons ago, music in the aspen trees and in the firs and burr oaks and even in the fields of drying corn.

Goddamn golf shirts and gym memberships and fake muscles and tans and cell phones and new cars. Trevor didn't care about any of that garbage. All he wanted was a garden. Isn't that funny?

He was righteous. He had a sense of duty, of what was right and wrong in the world, and I don't mean that in some evangelical sense of the word. And I don't mean that his world was just black and white. He just had a code, you know? He used to talk about that, about how few people had CODES anymore. It was his thing. He was always reading books about the samurai, about Japanese culture.

America, I think, is about poor people playing music and poor people sharing food and poor people dancing, even when everything else in their life is so desperate, and so dismal that it doesn't seem there should be any room for any music, any extra food, or any extra energy for dancing. And people can say that I'm wrong, that we're a puritanical people, an evangelical people, a selfish people, but I don't believe that. I don't want to believe that.

The world is composed of people who are hungry, and those who are not hungry. It goes back to energy, to entropy. If you are hungry for food, you will be hungry for God, too. Or politics, or some kind of love. The people who are hungry have holes in them that can't be filled. Don't get me wrong. I've seen starving people at peace with the world. I've been in villages where starving people gave me their supper. Food doesn't have anything to do with it; it's about the deeper kind of hunger, those holes.

This is my home. This is the place that first believed in me. That still believes in me.

as I watched their approach I wondered whether the slow pace of a wedding march was for the benefit of a bride on her most beautiful day, or for the aging father preparing to give her away.

Someone possessed with hunger, with a thought, with a craving, with a perversion, someone who needs their drug, someone who comes to your door in the middle of the night--they won't have light in their eyes. And that's how you know. That's what I look for. I don't look at their mouths. People lie with their mouths. I look at their eyes.

The way he loved was almost like a vise, a weight; at times she felt it verged on codependence--that his identity, his value system, all of it very much hinged on her.

We think the world is steady, rolling through space beneath our feet, day and night, rain and sunlight. And then, one day, you just fall off the planet and drift away, into outer space, and everything you thought was true all the laws that bound your life before, all the rules and norms that kept things in place, that kept you in place, they're gone. And nothing makes sense anymore. Gravity is gone. Love is gone.

Buttery nipples," I said, smiling broadly. "Buttery nipples.

The world is full of bad men, but if you are prepared, and if you are STRONG, then you cannot be taken off guard, and you will not be scared. And when they DO come to your door in the middle of the night and you are there to greet them with all the light there is inside you, all the strength, they are the ones who will run for the shadows. And I've SEEN it.

Corn might be the epidemic that kills us, but I've always loved staring at a big field of it, perfectly planted.

Winter in Wisconsin is the ideal time to avoid someone because our garments grow ever larger, ever thicker, and we go about the frozen world insulated beneath knit caps and mittens, our feet clad in mukluks or boots.

Sometimes that is what forgiveness is anyway, a deep sigh

I do not relish leaving home, leaving my children, leaving the familiarity of my bed, my coffee maker, my slippers, but I do love hotels.

Nothing patronizing, nothing sexist--just a slightly outdated politeness, and the general regard it might suggest.

First of all, I want you to think of the city as a collection of people. That's easy, right? You think of Minneapolis or Chicago or Milwaukee, you think of hundreds of thousands of people. Millions of people. That's what you think of right away. Maybe you think of sky-scrapers too, I don't know. But I think of people. The next thing you should think about is ideas. Think of each of those millions of people as a set of ideas. Like, That woman is a ballerina, she thinks about ballet. Or, that man is an architect, he thinks about buildings. If you begin thinking about it that way, a city is the greatest place in the world. It's millions of people, brushing up against one another, exchanging ideas, all the time, at every hour of the day.