Quotes from Adam Levin

I feel like a millionaire on the back of an armored jet-ski my samurai girlfriend who loves me is charging at a cartel speedboat to win a game of chicken. Isn't this the day's best part? You don't even have to remember to enjoy it. It enjoys you into itself.

Some men so needfully require complication, they find themselves defending their enemies.

To win their battles, these kinds of underdogs rely on their own and one another's ability to absorb violence. They find their might in their nature. They believe victory is assured by their nature, and as long as they act in accordance with their nature, they will claim it. Because they are able to fight, they must fight.

Reasonable of you, John. Reasonable of you, Dick. No two Israelites had ever pattered so goyischely.

And that is why, when he finally did come across the street, I lit my cigarette with my lighter - not to make him feel like a fool who had fallen for a trick, but rather because he had said, 'you had better luck with matches,' when in fact I had not. It was not the matches that brought him across the street. It was the matches that kept him on the bench.

And Desormie dragged the back of his hand back and forth across his mouth twice. And Brodsky coughed fakely to mask his laughter. And there was no more paste in the mouth-corners of Desormie. And Brodsky would not have to stare at paste while they talked in his office. That was nice of me. I went to the gym.

I know there are a number of things you know, probably too many things you know--too many, I say, not because any kind of knowledge has the capacity to be bad in itself, but rather because certain kinds of knowledge, particularly those kinds we often describe as arcane, can, by way of their very arcanity, serve to obscure the knowledge-bearer's understanding of the mundane.

And your parents, believe me—I don't care what kind of relationship you've got with them—they'll take you up on that offer. You share that sandwich with them—are you hearing me?—you share that glory sandwich with them and they'll love you forever.

The further south the throng went, the more reasons it discovered. Vendettas once sworn for half-forgotten offenses were remembered and invented with each passing blow. Everyone felt like a conduit of justice.

We are not taught to abide injustice through our faith; we are not taught to wait for Adonai to reach a hand down and save us. We are taught to faithfully destroy injustice; we are taught that to do so will force His hand.

Ashamed is just grateful waiting to happen. You only taste your dignity right before you puke it up.

Then he told me that that was like the Stranger. "That book?" "You wind a rubber band around your wrist so your hand falls asleep." "Oh," I said. "Does it do the trick?" Tom wished to God he knew, but there were never any rubberbands when he needed one.

To pay a price in advance, to the unjust, a price to prevent advances against your physical integrity -- that is to compromise your dignity. And dignity compromised is no longer dignity.

Fear is contempt, whether the fearful know it or don't.

The million different answers to 'Why not let it go?' have just as many good ones among them as the million you can get from 'Why should I let it go?

Desormie, ahead of me, hummed out a melody with lipfart percussion and aggressively dance-walked and thought it was strutting.

There'd be no story without complications. With nothing to overcome, we'd die unstoried deaths.

Our plastic muskets, though powderless, will frontload, and our coup will not be bloodless, nor will the blood be lambly. It will stain the lion's den whose bars though invisible are verily there as well roll along, doo-da doo-da and a thousand lonely dirges.

If we act safe while it's safe for us to be dangerous, we're not taking advantage of being in love, and we could ruin it that way.

the law of parsimony.

he liked to eat fish patty sandwiches from McDonald's, so his taste in food smells wasn't reliable

Without constancy, we fear that the foundations of our individual worlds could crumble. Without constancy we face the unknown. So we repeat. We pattern. To maintain constancy.

It was a relief to decide you didn't have to decide. It was a relief to have faith in immutability, a relief to lose faith in your ability to change something, even when it was something you'd wish you could change. It was a relief to be imposed on intractably. Acceptance, if not brave, was at least a relief. That was the trick of it.

With your Social Security number in the wind, whoever finds it—or, more likely, whoever buys it on one of the many black-market information exchanges on the deep web—holds the keys to every part of your life. What that means—plain and simple—is that you're going to need an efficient way to keep one eye over your shoulder, all the time.