Playbook Quotes

I don't want to stay in the bad place, where no one believes in silver linings or love or happy endings.

If clouds are blocking the sun, there will always be a silver lining that reminds me to keep on trying.

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.

I am practicing being kind over being right.

You need to make time for your family no matter what happens in your life

The only way to beat my crazy was by doing something even crazier. Thank you. I love you. I knew it from the moment I saw you. I'm sorry it took me so long to catch up.

You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.

I still love you in my own fucked-up way.

Life is random and fucked-up and arbitrary, until you find someone who can make sense of it all for you— if only temporarily.

Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it's a sin if you don't reach back... I'm telling you.

She looks sad. She looks angry. She looks different from everyone else I know—she cannot put on that happy face others wear when they know they are being watched. She doesn’t put on a face for me, which makes me trust her somehow.

It hurts to look at the clouds, but it also helps, like most things that cause pain.

Life is hard, and children have to be told how hard life can be…So they will be sympathetic to others. So they will understand that some people have it harder than they do and that a trip through this world can be a wildly different experience, depending on what chemicals are raging through one’s mind.

When she needed help most, she was abandoned—and only when she offered help to others was she beloved.

There will always be a part of me that is dirty and sloppy, but I like that, just like all the other parts of myself.

Most people lose the ability to see silver linings even though they are always there above us almost every day.

Looking into another person's eyes for an extended period of time proved to be a powerful thing. And if you don't believe me, try it yourself.

And I still love you in my own fucked-up way. I miss you, I really do. Can we still be friends?

I...have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful.

When life reaches out with a moment like this, it's a sin if you don't reach back.

...I am now watching the movie of my life as I live it.

Maybe you will never be able to forgive me, but I wanted you to know I had the best intentions-and I still love you in my own fucked-up way.

The world will break your heart ten ways to Sunday, that’s guaranteed. And I can’t begin to explain that- or the craziness inside myself and everybdy else,but guess what? Sunday is my fav day again

I think all it really takes for different people to get along is a common rooting interest and a few beers.

Ugh.” Cole rolled his eyes, gave a small laugh. “In a move straight out of Lee’s playbook, I rolled over in bed this morning and hit the dresser. Already killing it this morning.

In my arms is a woman who has given me a Skywatcher's Cloud Chart, a woman who knows all my secrets, a woman who knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I'm on, and yet she allows me to hold her anyway. There's something honest about all this, and I cannot imagine any other woman lying in the middle of a frozen soccer field with me - in the middle of a snowstorm even - impossibly hoping to see a single cloud break free of a nimbostratus.

I need you so fucking bad.

He doesn’t ever feel the war that goes on in my chest every single fucking day—the chemical explosions that light up my skull like the Fourth of July and the awful needs and impulses and…

I opened up to you and you judge me

I believe in happy endings," I tell him, "And it feels like this movie has gone on for the right amount of time.

I will not be quoting Hemingway anytime soon, nor will I ever read another one of his books. And if he were still alive, I would write him a letter right now and threaten to strangle him dead with my bare hands just for being so glum. No wonder he put a gun to his head, like it says in the introductory essay.

When she needed help most, she was abandoned.

Do you like foreign films?” “With subtitles?” “Yes.” “I hate those types of films.” “Me too,” Cliff says. “Mostly because - “ “No happy endings.

A good psychologist will take already-traumatic events in your life and work with you to contextualize them as non-traumatic. A bad psychologist will take non-traumatic events in your life and twist your narrative to both make them traumatic and connect them to your current problems. The problem is that good psychologists solve your issues while bad ones create dependency and thus recurring revenue streams.

We now have the liberal playbook and we know what they are doing, and we are using it against them. Unlike the Democrats though, we aren't out to destroy our society, we are out to save it.

I think it's strange to live in a house with someone you cannot talk to—especially when that someone is your father—and the thought makes me a little sad.

So I’m thinking this is the part of my movie where things appear as if nothing is going to work out. I have to remind myself that all movie characters go through this sort of dark period before they find their happy ending.

When I run, I always pretend I am running toward Nikki, and it makes me feel like I am decreasing the amount of time I have to wait until I see her again.

I can be a very valuable friend to you, but you do not want me as an enemy.

People experience anger when their expectations around how they should be treated don’t align with their actual treatment (or when they expect a thing to happen based on some series of actions and it does not happen).

Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly...

When I read the actual story-how Gatsby loves Daisy so much but can't ever be with her no matter how hard he tries-I feel like ripping the book in half and calling up Fitzgerald and telling him his book is all wrong, even though I know Fitzgerald is probably deceased. Especially when Gatsby is shot dead in his swimming pool the first time he goes for a swim all summer, Daisy doesn't even go to his funeral, Nick and Jordan part ways, and Daisy ends up sticking with racist Tom, whose need for sex basically murders an innocent woman, you can tell Fitzgerald never took the time to look up at clouds during sunset, because there's no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you.

A culture that has a moral compass which always points toward the elite’s conception of good—or a society’s default conceptions of “good”—has a broken moral compass. Compasses have value because they point toward a single magnetic North, not a moving position.

Miracles happen on Christmas, Pat. Everybody knows that shit.

I am so happy. I am so impossibly happy.

The world will break your heart ten times till Sunday,that's guaranteed

This is what I believe to be true. You have to do everything you can. You have to work your hardest. And if you do, if you stay positive, then you have a shot at a silver lining.

My other friends are in music relaxation class, which I do not attend, because smooth jazz makes me angry sometimes.

If clouds are blocking the sun, there will always be a silver lining that reminds me to keep on trying, because I know that while things might seem dark now, my wife is coming back to me soon.

I’m a screwed-up person who no longer knows how to communicate with the people I love. But I meant everything I told you in my letter. If I were your Nikki, I would have come back to you on Christmas Day, but I’m not Nikki. I know. And I’m sorry.

It hurts to look at the clouds, but it also helps, like most things that cause pain. So I need to run, and as my lungs burn and my back rebels with that stabbing knife feeling and my legs muscles harden and the half inch of loose skin around my waist jiggles, I feel as though my penance for the day is being done and that maybe God will be pleased enough to lend me some help, which I think is why He has been showing me interesting clouds for the past week.

As a society, we assume that humans naturally run from emotions like suffering, helplessness, and hopelessness, but the truth is these emotions are highly addictive and far easier to indulge in (in a perversely satisfying way) than positive emotional subsets. Better yet, when you convince others of your helplessness, some people begin to regard you as a victim—someone to be adored and protected. 

Your mother is risking a lot, because she believes in you.

Look, sometimes it’s OK with girls like this, they wanna have fun, and sometimes it’s not because they've got a broken wing and they’re hurt and they’re an easy target. In this case, this particular case, I think that wing is being fixed, my friend, and you gotta make sure that it’s mended and you’re getting in the way of that right now, okay, because she’s sensitive and she’s smart, she’s artistic. This is a great girl, you gotta be respectful to that. Come on, let me walk you to your car, you’re a better guy than this.

But I'll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly, like our marriage did, Pat. And literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for people to endure nobly.

We will preserve the capacity for independent thought through a society so heterogeneous that it will make our own look trite. We will intentionally craft new ethnicities, religions, and ways of existing. The genome will be our canvas and flesh our clay. Man is a young species. We still occupy the same bodies with which our ancestors hunted and picked berries. We are so trapped by the limitations of our biology that we lack the capacity to conceive our ultimate potential. 

You better watch out, or you're going to be defeated by pessimism!

After I returned to New Jersey, I thought I was safe, because I did not think Kenny G could leave the bad place, which I realize is silly now - because Kenny G is extremely talented and resourceful and a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Imagine someone from that future could go back in time and talk to you—someone who lives at a time in which mankind only inhabits one planet, who is arguably among the final generations of humans capable of permanently changing the future of human cultures across thousands of planets by creating a durable culture and high-fertility-rate family that carries prosocial values into the future. Why would you tell them you didn’t make an effort to fix things while one person's efforts could still make a difference? 

Haven't you ever noticed that life is like a series of movies?

People who have never been through any sort of shit always assume that they know how you should react to having your life destroyed. And the people who have been through shit think you're suppose to deal with it the exact same way they did. As if there's a playbook for surviving hell.

Maybe my movie isn't over, I say, because sometimes moviemakers trick the audience with a false bad ending, and just when you think the movie is going to end badly, something dramatic happens, which leads to the happy ending. This seems like a good spot for something dramatic to happen, especially since it's my birthday.

The first time the extent of this problem was obvious to me was when I was hanging out with a small group of people in which one unironically said, “I would not consider dating someone who was not regularly seeing a psychologist”—and others in the group agreed with them. It was at that point I realized that some psychologists were convincing their patients that no person could be mentally healthy without regularly visiting them. They had so thoroughly incepted a dependency in their patients that they had created a cultural identity around that dependency.

People can be cruel,' he says with a sympathetic look that makes me trust him even more. And right then I realize that he is not writing down all my words in a file, which I really appreciate, let me tell you.

He did not deserve to die, and his death absolutely proves that life is random and fucked-up and arbitrary, until you find someone who can make sense of it all for you—if only temporarily.

I am trying to be kind instead of right.

[...] because he doesn't ever feel the war that goes on in my chest every single fucking day - the chemical explosions that light up my skull like the Fourth of July and the awful needs and impulses and...

We will bring humanity across the vast Saharas of emptiness between the stars and create a dynamic, perpetually advancing empire that spans galaxies, universes, and realities. Just as our ancestors wove fabric from organic matter, our descendants will weave the fabric of reality. Humanity’s descendants will be entities beyond our wildest conceptions of the divine. Omnipotence and the ability to create universes will be the least of their powers. Whether they are good or evil—whether they even come to be at all—is up to us. In that sense, we have even more power than they do.

When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

It wasn’t that it had been too long without a girl. It was that it’d been a lifetime without the right one.

So I pull Tifanny closer, kiss the hard spot between her perfectly plucked eyebrows, and after a deep breath, I say, "I think I need you too.

The problem with being an adult is absolutely everything.

My only hope is that someday-after you have stabilized your mental health-you will take comfort in the fact that I reached out to you after all that happened.

I just liked being around you, even if we didn’t say anything.

Why did You give us so many stories about miracles? Why did You send Your Son down from heaven? Why did You give us movies if life doesn’t ever end well? What kind of fucking God are You? Do You want me to be miserable for the rest of my life?

H of H: I cannot rise. Too heavy with filth and sin. Th: Give me your hand. H of H: I'll stain you. Th: I'll take it.

There is no growth in assuming. For it does not give, it takes away.

He never once tells me what Tiffany thinks or what is going on in her heart: the awful feelings, the conflicting impulses, the needs, the desperation, everything that makes her different from Ronnie and Veronica, who have each other and their daughter, Emily, and a good income and a house and everything else that keeps people from calling them "odd.

You want to be a good person, don't you, Pat?' I nod. I cry. I do want to be a good person, I really do. 'I'm going to up your meds,' Dr. Patel tells me. 'You might feel a little sluggish, but it should help to curb your violent outbursts. You need to know it's your actions that will make you a good person, not desire.

So revenge is obviously a deeply messed-up expression of vindictiveness. It is hard to even call it "evil." It is just plain insanity. A result of deeply messed-up thinking.

Sometimes you think someone is holding your hand when really they’re holding you back.

Tiffany and I are great friends, and I appreciate all that she is doing for me now. But she is not you. I still love you, Nikki. And you can’t control or alter true love.

I do this! Time after time after time! I do all this shit for other people! And then I wake up and I'm empty! I have nothing!

People who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because you are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.

The world will break your heart ten ways to Sunday. That's guaranteed. I can't begin to explain that. Or the craziness inside myself and everyone else. But guess what? Sunday's my favorite day again. I think of what everyone did for me, and I feel like a very lucky guy.

Somehow I know that Nikki will never love me as much-no matter how much I improve my character.

...but Cliff keeps pushing for the truth like therapists do, because they all have some sort of psychic ability that allows them to see through your lies, and therefore they know you will eventually tire of the talking game and will offer up the truth.

In the airport we hugged each other all at once, a team huddle but with nothing but a Hail Mary left in our playbook. We'd been through all of this before. We loved each other. We fought for each other. When worlds collapsed we were buried in the rubble together and when we were dug out of the rubble and rescued we all celebrated together.

Does anyone else have a phone?" said Jason. Nim shook her head. "It was in my clutch at the party." "I never got a new one," said Alia. "And Diana doesn't have a phone." Theo clutched his chest. "No - no phone? How do you function?" Diana cast Theo a haughty glance that looked like it had been pulled straight from Nim's playbook. "I wear practical shoes and avoid the branches of olive trees." "So cold," said Nim with a grin. "So accurate." "Shhhh," Theo said to his pointy-toed shoes. "She didn't mean it.

I still believe you fell into my life for a reason.

At their peak, affairs rarely lack imagination. Nor do they lack desire, abundance of attention, romance, and playfulness. Shared dreams, affection, passion and endless curiosityーall these are natural ingredients found in the adulterous plot. They are also ingredients of thriving relationships. It is no accident that many of the most erotic couples lift their marital strategies directly from the infidelity playbook.

The Cyrus-Swift Phenomenon. Taylor Swift has had, like, eighteen boyfriends, but everyone still thinks she’s really classy because she’s just so poised and sweet and appropriate-looking. Meanwhile, Miley Cyrus was with the same guy for practically forever, and people are always calling her a slut. And I’m not saying we should be calling T. Swift a slut instead—even if you do date a lot of guys, you don’t deserve that. What I’m saying is, when it comes to popular opinion, it’s all about the persona.

Satan says, offering the next temptation. “If God exists, He will surely save you. If you are in fact his Son, God will surely save you.” Why would God not make Himself manifest, to rescue His only begotten Child from hunger and isolation and the presence of great evil? But that establishes no pattern for life. It doesn’t even work as literature. The deus ex machina—the emergence of a divine force that magically rescues the hero from his predicament—is the cheapest trick in the hack writer’s playbook. It makes a mockery of independence, and courage, and destiny, and free will, and responsibility. Furthermore, God is in no wise a safety net for the blind. He’s not someone to be commanded to perform magic tricks, or forced into Self-revelation—not even by His own Son.

Soon I am seeing the blue-and-yellow flags that line the campus streets, and it makes me feel happy and sad at the same time to be back at La Salle--almost like looking at old pictures of people who have either died or with whom you have lost contact.

I've seen the way you've been looking at me. Don't bullshit me, Pat. I live in the addition around back, which is completely separate from the house, so there's no chance of my parents walking in on us. I hate the fact that you wore a football jersey to dinner, but you can fuck me as long as we turn the lights out first. Okay?

I remember just how bizarre my friendship with Tiffani has been - but then I remember that no one else but Tiffani could really even come close to understanding how I feel after losing Nikki forever. I remember that apart time is finally over, and while Nikki is gone for good, I still have a woman in my arms who has suffered greatly and desperately needs to believe once again that she is beautiful. In my arms is a woman who has given me a Skywatcher's Cloud Chart, a woman who knows all my secrets, a woman who knows just how messed up my mind is, how many pills I'm on and yet she allows me to hold her anyway. There's something honest about all of this, and I cannot imagine any other woman lying in the middle of a frozen soccer filed with me-in the middle of a snowstorm even - impossibly hoping to see a single cloud break free of a nimbostratus. Nikki would not have done this for me, not even on her best day.

I nod and I promise I will report any hallucinations to my mother, but I do not really believe I will hallucinate no matter what type of drugs he gives me, especially since I know he will not be giving me LSD or anything like that. I figure weaker people probably complain about their drugs, but I am not weak and I can control my mind pretty well.

Let’s call it the scarcity diversion. Here’s the playbook. First, allow elites to hoard a resource like money or land. Second, pretend that arrangement is natural, unavoidable—or better yet, ignore it altogether. Third, attempt to address social problems caused by the resource hoarding only with the scarce resources left over. So instead of making the rich pay all their taxes, for instance, design a welfare state around the paltry budget you are left with when they don’t. Fourth, fail. Fail to drive down the poverty rate. Fail to build more affordable housing. Fifth, claim this is the best we can do. Preface your comments by saying, “In a world of scarce resources…” Blame government programs. Blame capitalism. Blame the other political party. Blame immigrants. Blame anyone you can except those who most deserve it. “Gaslighting” is not too strong a phrase to describe such pretense.

Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again.

Instead he thinks up the worst ending imaginable: Hemingway has Catherine die from hemorrhaging after their child is stillborn. It is the most torturous ending I have ever experienced and probably will ever experience in literature, movies, or even television. I am crying so hard at the end, partly for the characters, yes, but also because Nikki actually teaches this book to children. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to expose impressionable teenagers to such a horrible ending. Why not just tell high school students that their struggle to improve themselves is all for nothing?