John Darnielle > Quotes

“When you punish a person for dreaming his dream
Don't expect him to thank or forgive you.”
― John Darnielle

“This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“People say friends don't destroy one another - what do they know about friends?”
― John Darnielle

“There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Good things never last, bad things never die.”
― John Darnielle, Master of Reality

“I didn’t feel like I’d really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I’d come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“It isn’t really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“People trying to help you when you’re past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and that you’re standing in the doorway.”
― John Darnielle

“but people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Not everybody wants to get out and see the world. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you just want to figure out how to fit yourself into the world you already know.”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

“Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain, period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“And I started to say “fine,” and I meant to say “fine,” but I ended up saying that I felt my life was filled like a big jug to the brim with almost indescribable joy, so much that I hardly knew how to handle it.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don't manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn't find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it’s no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can’t miss shopping like you’d miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.”
― John Darnielle

“You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“It's not that nobody ever gets away: that's not true. It's that you carry it with you. It doesn't matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.”
― John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

“I am heavy in his arms, and I feel safe there, but I am lost, and I need constantly to be shoring up the wall that holds my emotions at bay, or I will feel something too great to contain.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“God is present in the sweeping gesture, but the devil is in the details.”
― John Darnielle

“When anger rears up in me I have a trick I do where I picture it as a freshly uncoiled snake dropping down from the jungle canopy and heading for my neck. If I look at it directly it’ll disappear, but I have to do it while the snake’s still dropping or it will strike. This sounds like something they’d teach you in therapy at the hospital or something, but it’s not. It’s just a trick I found somewhere by myself. Once you’ve looked at a deadly thing and seen it disappear, what more is there to do? Walk on through the empty jungle toward the city past the clearing.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“I can feel it in the rotten air tonight/ In the tips of my fingers, in the skin on my face/ In the weak last gasp of the evening's dying light/ In the way those eyes I've always loved illuminate this place/ Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell/ Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell/ I will walk down to the end with you/ If you will come all the way down with me”
― John Darnielle

“My parents’ room is an uncataloged planet, a night sky presence unknown to scientists but feared by the secret faithful who trade rumors of its mystery.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“I wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there are.”
― John Darnielle, Master of Reality

“When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are”
― John Darnielle

“For reasons that seem obvious to me, I don’t believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van

“But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.”
― John Darnielle, Devil House

“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room.”
― John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van