Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms
John Hodgman
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The Sky Lounge is not aspirational. It is desperational.”
“Hipsterism is the purposeful cultivation of uncool and esoteric tastes, and sometimes a shortcut to that aesthetic is to embrace the ugly.”
“becomes self-evident to any parent that the pain of loving and caring for another thing is better than the ease of not. I will admit even fur parents know this secret. Parenthood begins as an expression of narcissism, of personal genetic redoubling; but that selfishness is quickly burned away in the crucible of tears, vomit, fevers, and close calls; and it is repaid only in the incalculable joy of seeing someone else thrive in happiness and apart from you. You disappear, and it is a fucking relief.”
“It takes a long time for white guys to appreciate that they are breakable. They do not live from birth with the daily fear that they might be attacked or detained or killed. Their bodies are not constant targets of power. Their bodies are power, so they throw those bodies up and down mountains and stairs and out of airplanes and into pointless online yelling matches for fun. They just presume they will survive.”
“Whatever you may have thought about Hillary Clinton, my daughter watched as a highly experienced and qualified woman lost a job to a neophyte dilettante cartoon character of a white man who openly bragged of molesting women. My daughter isn’t dumb. She got the message.”
“Everyone is doing what they have to do, and everyone is doing the best they can. And soon you will be going home.”
“when you are shooting a television show, time is more important than any one performance. If you are doing a bad job at acting, I had learned, they will not bother to tell you. That would be a waste of time, and it might put you into an emotional hole that would also waste time. And by the same token, I had learned that when they say you have done a good job at acting, they are probably lying.”
“these moments you wonder what you are teaching their kids, and your own. Then you realize you are teaching them the truth about America.”
“that the secret to my implausible, financially self-sufficient adulthood was the same secret that had brought me here: I was invited to do something, and I said yes. It is better to say yes than no. Unless saying yes will hurt you or someone else, say yes. Don’t say no if the invitation is scary. That’s when you should definitely say yes. If a computer company invites you to be in an ad and you’re scared to say yes because (a) it will mess up your pickup schedule at your child’s school and (b) it will push you well past your comfortable limits of fraudulency and change your life forever, take it from me, don’t say no, like I did, and then get lucky only because they asked again. They won’t always ask again. And don’t say no, like I did, to appearing on Breaking Bad because you were afraid to live in Albuquerque for a while, away from your family. Do your work. Do the things you love. Don’t ask permission. The more work you make in the world, the more likely someone will ask you to do some new thing, some bigger thing, or at least some interesting thing. And when they ask, say yes.”
“success does not mean you cannot be tricked.”
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