Casey Gerald Quotes

My life had been so often saved by women and so often disturbed or at least made uncomfortable by men that I had never been convinced that men should be in charge of anything, let alone the universe or a woman or a child, especially if the child was me. So

And the primary if not only difference between the liberals and the illiberals on this issue is that the American alt-right and France's National Front and Germany's National Democratic Party (I haven't been to England, so will leave them out of this) will try their best to kill you quickly or keep you out of the West altogether, whereas the liberals will write elaborate pamphlets about your condition while doing little to change it and even less to come in contact with it -- or with you, for that matter.

Shame and Fame: These are the leader’s most important tools of coercion, absent money or guns.

Love, she defines, via M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm, is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

I also longed for something to believe in. That was greedy. My mistake. I had not learned that the search for belief is very likely the most violent known to man, not infrequently ending in death or derangement,

At last, the officials sought an intervention from the highest power in the land, who sent them back with a sign. An actual sign, which was erected in the village square for all to see. It read: THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE BY ORDER OF THE KING

The way we were taught to be men, to be human beings even, was a dead end.

This was the first time I learned how far you can make it in America if you have enough disregard for your personal welfare. Maybe that’s why football is the national pastime.

And for that entire, surprisingly pleasant journey, we pretended that we were not a group of people who had destroyed one another, but a family. Maybe there’s no difference between the two.

We did a lot of things that we wouldn’t advise anybody we loved to do.

See, if you catch it from the right angle, a boy picking himself up by his bootstraps looks just like a suicide.

Oh, no, Casey. It’s just so . . . stereotypical, you know? You’re at Yale now. You don’t have to do that anymore. You want to snatch her bob off. You want to tell her she’s a racist. You want to cry. You want to go home and stay there. But you can’t do that. This is jail—act like it. Change.

I have come with urgent news: we must find another mountain, if not another world, to call our own.

What kind of just God, after all, would help you hunt somebody down?

Manufacture the Momentum: Always convince others that something big is happening, even if nothing at all has happened yet.

The Illusion of Inclusion: Make everyone feel like they are helping to decide things, even if you have already decided, which should be the case.

I no longer believed in people. I found the prospect of needing a human being, trusting them, extending myself for them, to be more horrifying than being abandoned, or almost killed, or damned for all eternity. People seemed to be the most dangerous things in this world.

Sometimes we don’t have the luxury of a slippery slope and find, instead, a cliff. Maybe that’s what happened to them that night or maybe, bless their hearts, they had spent a great deal of energy keeping it together—since my tenth birthday, since the seizure, since the beauty convention or the move to Columbus or the first time they met. Who knows? It’s amazing, either way, how quickly you can become a thing you’d never thought of being and may not even want to be.

Because otherwise they must admit that anti-hope is a choice—a choice birthed by fear, by a cautious assessment of risk, a selective reading of the past projected onto the future, a failure of the imagination and a crippling of the will. They have to make Hope the province of fools so that Anti-Hope is not revealed to be the province of cowards.