Collected Quotes for the Month: December 2016

Best of

[In response to those who say slavery was a long time ago, you need to get over it, etc] This is what I say to those people, ‘To argue that is to say effects don’t matter. To say that effects don’t compound. Everything that happens in the world has an effect. […] So if you have a system that promotes your well-being, you are going to grow in that world. So if your great grandfather could have some money, a house, and a piece of land, and then his child and then his child, […] it’s going to get to you in some shape or form. Even if it is just in the way of knowledge. Knowing how to own a place, knowing how to get credit, knowing how to live in a different world, these are benefits that you have.’ So when you say […] ‘Well I started from nothing.’ I’m like, ‘No, but you didn’t start from nothing though. That’s the thing you don’t understand. You started from nothing in your world, but it’s not nothing, nothing.’
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

Only God can truly save. I help with the small things.
— “Diamonds Are Forever.” Forever

Our bodies are having their own conversation separate and apart from us. Is this the difference between friendship and something else? This awareness that I have of him?
— “Forecast.” Everything, Everything

I nod slowly, certain I agree with what he’s saying now, but equally certain that I’m going to disagree with whatever’s next.
— “Forecast.” Everything, Everything

Promise: The lie you want to keep.
— “Madeline’s Dictionary.” Everything, Everything

I turn in his arms, thinking how quickly it’s become my favorite place in the world. Familiar, foreign, comforting, and thrilling all at once.
— “Remembrance of Things Present.” Everything, Everything

My heart is too bruised and I want to keep the pain as a reminder. I don’t want sunlight on it. I don’t want it to heal. Because if it does, I might be tempted to use it again.
— “Reunion.” Everything, Everything

We can’t just walk away from people’s we care about when it starts to cost us something.
— “Season 2/ Episode 8.” Humans

We live in a post-fact world. Everyone can make their own facts. You go on the internet, you can find anything that backs up your facts, you can find graphs that believe what you believe in, like everything.
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” The Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

[On Nelson Mandela effort in trying to prevent oppression in South Africa] If that was the surgery, we didn’t succeed in the rehab.
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” The Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

I see life like a video game. I don’t know all the moves. I know the moves that I know, I know which moves of mine work so I’m gonna do those moves. Sometimes I’m gonna meet someone who teaches me a new move, I’m gonna use that move in the game and sometimes when you’re playing, I’m gonna be like ‘Hey man, I don’t know if this will work for you, but whenever I’m up against this boss I use this move.’ I’m not telling you how to do it, I’m just telling you this has worked for me in my world.
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” The Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?
— “The Lonely City.” The Lonely City – Pages 5

Don’t make me hate you. Loving you is painful enough.
— “Season 1/ Episode 2.” Fleabag

The Rest

People make mistakes. That’s why they put rubbers at the end of pencils.
— “Season 1/ Episode 6.” Fleabag

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.
— “The Lonely City.” The Lonely City – Pages 3-4

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often interacts, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up or change in social circles.
— “The Lonely City.” The Lonely City – Pages 4

One thing I’ve come to love and learn when it comes to the American press is, you have to know they will frame the story in the way that is best for their narrative.
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

Every leader should have a term limit because many politicians come in with noble intentions. [But] What they end up doing over time is creating a world that is often times a dictatorship where it is a mangled version of what they intended.
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” The Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

One thing I’ve come to love and learn when it comes to the American press is, you have to know they will frame the story in the way that is best for their narrative.
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

[On men acknowledging misogyny] a lot of the time the problem with that conversation, I feel, is it becomes ‘If I acknowledge it does that mean I have to give mine [male privilege] away?’
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

There is a difference between claiming a victimhood and standing up and saying that playing field is not level.
— “Trevor Noah – 12/7/2016.” Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

“Art… is love made public.”
— “A Christmas Special.” Sense8

I will always love the person you used to be.
— “The Ballad of Little Santino.” Good Behavior

How you get to the product is almost more important than the product nowadays.
— Donald Glover

Nerdy is liking stuff that takes work to like.
— Donald Glover

College isn’t about learning, it’s about training.
— Barry

It’s like musical chairs or… I mean, you turn 25, the music stops, and whoever you’re dating, you marry? It’s not just my sister, either. It’s all of her friends. I don’t see them for a few months, and then bam, they show up with rocks on their fingers and some random guy in tow.
— Barry

You take the baton from the ones who’ve come before, and you carry it as far as you can and then you hand it off.
— Barry

I’m from a lot of places, but I live here now.
— Barry

[On whether change requires violence] The good it does is temporary, its evil permanent.
— “Season 2/ Episode 8.” Humans

Killed by [violence], not defeated.
— “Season 2/ Episode 8.” Humans

In my head I know I’ve been in love before, but it doesn’t feel like it. Being in love with you is better than the first time. It feels like the first time and the last time and the only time all at once.
— “The Murphy Bed.” Everything, Everything

Infinite: The state of not knowing where one body ends and another begins.
— “Madeline’s dictionary.” Everything, Everything

I once told Olly that I know my heart better than I knew anything else, and it’s still true. I know the places in my heart, but the names have all changed.
— “Geography.” Everything, Everything

Nothing hurts except my heart, but I’m trying not to use it. I keep the blinds closed. I read my books. Existential or nihilist ones. I have no patience for books that pretend life has meaning. I have no patience for happy endings.
— “Pretending.” Everything, Everything

I want to say something, not just something, but the perfect thing to comfort him, to make him forget his family for a few minutes, but I can’t think of it. This is why people touch. sometimes words are just not enough.
— “Olly Says.” Everything, Everything

Isn’t growing apart a part of growing up?
— “A Tale of Two Maddys.” Everything, Everything

Asymptote: A wish that continually approaches but never achieves fulfillment.
— “Madeline’s Dictionary.” Everything, Everything

It’s a strange thing to realize that you’re willing to die. It doesn’t come in a flash, a sudden epiphany. It happens slowly, a balloon leak in reverse.
— “Half Life.” Everything, Everything

Sometimes you do things for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong ones and sometimes it’s impossible to tell the difference.
— “Other Worlds” Everything, Everything

They tried to stop me. They said it wasn’t worth my life, but I said that it was my life, and it was up to me to decide what it was worth. I said I was going to go and either I was going to die or I was going to get a better life.
— “Infected.” Everything, Everything

Most people are good with their bodies or their minds but not both.
— “First Contact, Part Three.” Everything, Everything

I try to ignore the feelings that surface when I think about them. There’s sadness that’s not quite sadness, and then guilt. ‘It’s weird to miss something you’ve never had-or don’t remember having, anyway.
— “Forecast.” Everything, Everything

They say memories make us who we are. That the past defines us. But we can’t forget to grow, [and] evolve, because sometimes a memory can be so powerful that we get stuck in it. Frozen in a moment.
— “Punk is Dead.” Forever

“[…] you know that old saying that there’s no ‘I’ in team? Don’t believe it.  There is 25 of them. All with their own lives and their own problems.”
– “Scratched.” Pitch

“[…] what keeps us alive, more important than blood or oxygen, or even love, is hope.”
– “Pilot.” Forever

“You can learn a lot from a body. How a life was lived, what was their pain, suffering, life experiences, even if they were loved. But what a body can’t tell you is why. And for those left behind, that seems to be the only question that really matters.”
“Look Before You Leap.” Forever

“Even God finds it hard to love and be wise at the same time.”
“Look Before You Leap.” Forever