David Vann > Quotes

“Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“Each thing that happens to us, each and every thing, it leaves some dent, and that dent will always be there. Each of us is a walking wreck.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn't true. There's only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“Having something to look forward to changes everything. I've always needed a future. I can't live without one.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“Because you can choose who you’ll be with, but you can’t choose who they’ll become.”
― David Vann, Caribou Island

“Born to destroy kings, born to reshape the world, born to horrify and break and remake, born to endure and never be erased. Hekate Medea, more than god and more than woman, alive now, in the time of origin.”
― David Vann, Bright Air Black

“We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“Each one a little bit different but following some blueprint somewhere. As if each of us might have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“A change in those moments, some switch turned off forever, the end of trust or safety or love, and how do we ever find the switch again?”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“up for it, and I’m sorry. That’s not enough. You’re going to search until you find something, and you’re going to tell me. Right now. Sheri. Please. You do it now or we’re gone. You give me some way to have some sympathy for you as I stand in this nice house, all lovingly redone, and think about the broken house you left us in, with its leaky roof and no heat and no insulation and nothing. Tell your sob story about the fucking war, whatever it was that my mom thought you were so broken about. My grandfather closed his eyes. No story ever explains. But I’ll give you what you want. I think I know the moment you want, because I made a kind of decision. There was some change. But I can’t start the story at the beginning. I’ve never been able to do that. I have to start at the end and then go back, and it doesn’t finish, because you can go back forever. Do it, my mother said. I don’t think Caitlin should hear. She can hear. Okay. You’re her mother. That’s right. So I won’t give the awful details, but I was lying in a pile of bodies. My friends. The closest friends I’ve ever had. Not piled there on purpose, but just the way it ended up because I had been working on the axle, lying on the ground. And the thing is, the war was over. It had been over for days, and we were laughing and a bit drunk, telling jokes. There was something unbearable about the fact that we’d all be going our separate ways now. The truth is that we didn’t want to leave. We wanted the war over, but we didn’t want what we had together to be over. I think we all had some sense that this was the closest we’d ever be to anyone, and that our families might feel like strangers now. So that’s it? You couldn’t be a father and husband because you weren’t done being a buddy? No. No. It’s the way it happened, in a moment that was supposed to be safe. After every moment of every day in fear for years, we were finally safe, and that’s when the slugs came and I watched my friends torn apart and landing on me, dying. That’s the point. We were supposed to be safe. And with your mother, too, I was supposed to be safe. A wife, a family. The story doesn’t make any sense unless you know every moment before it, every time we thought we were going to die, all the times we weren’t safe. You can’t just be told about that. You have to feel it, how long one night can be, and then all of them put together, hundreds of nights and then more, and there’s a kind of deal that’s made, a deal with god. You do certain terrible things, you endure things, because there’s a bargain made. And then when god says the deal’s off later, after you’ve already paid, and you see your friends ripped through, yanked like puppets on a day that was safe, and you find out your wife is going to die young, and you get to watch her dying, something that again is going to be for years, hundreds of nights more, all deals are off.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with a kind of eternity, unbearable.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“Maybe this is as near as we can come to forgiveness. Not the past wiped away, nothing undone, but some willingness in the present, some recognition and embrace and slowing down.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“That’s true. It doesn’t make any sense. Welcome to the adult world, coming soon. I work so I can work more. I try not to want anything so maybe I’ll get something. I starve so I can be less and more. I try to be free so I can be alone. And there’s no point to any of it. They left out that part.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“I thought that was a wonderful idea, that one could be on hell without being in it, like “Just Visiting” on the Monopoly board.”
― David Vann, Legend of a Suicide

“Low branches, dead and snapping against us. On the lookout for rattlesnakes. But the path was short enough, and soon we were on a kind of terrace. Old lawn overgrown by grass and weed, old concrete cracked in discrete chunks, vast areas overrun. An enchanted place for me, and only for me, because I was too young to remember, and so in my mind this place could become more.”
― David Vann, Goat Mountain

“WE THINK OF CAIN AS THE ONE WHO KILLED HIS BROTHER, but who else was around to kill? They were the first two born. Cain killed what was available. The story has nothing to do with brothers.”
― David Vann, Goat Mountain

“A favored bit from "A Legend of Good Men"

"My mother and I each had our routines. She taught high school, took long hikes in the state parks near our house, read mystery novels, and sometimes disappeared with explanations as thin as, "I just need a few days," or "I'm going to visit a friend."
"Which friend?" I would ask.
"That's right," she would say.”
― David Vann, Legend of a Suicide

“Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make and destroy us. They warp the world and remake it their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“This is what I’ve always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“The point was the struggle. The earth thickened here so that he would labor. The shovel felt heavy so that he could feel he was doing something. The world provided resistance, and as we struggled through, we learned our final lessons.”
― David Vann, Dirt

“That night longer than all my life before it. No scale or measure in this world can ever be held constant. We are always slipping.”
― David Vann, Goat Mountain

“I've thought of it ever since, the idea that we don't stray far, that what feels like discovery is only the revealing of what was hidden but there, waiting. I remember because I think this might be a path to forgiveness, to realize that no matter how violent, how frightening my mother was, it was not random but at least partly inescapable, that who she was had been set in motion long before and she had to suffer that person as much as I did.”
― David Vann, Aquarium

“We're not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.”
― David Vann, Goat Mountain

“This table felt extremely dangerous. He understood now that what held his family together was violence.”
― David Vann, Dirt

“Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.”
― David Vann, Legend of a Suicide

“Duration. What nature offers us is duration, the promise when we panic and are trapped and want to be anywhere else, that moment will extend and continue and grow and become only worse. The world invented for reasons that didn’t take us into account, but we forget that and so we underestimate.”
― David Vann, Goat Mountain

“If enough people repeat the stories for long enough, Jason will become something that cannot die, but he also will have been erased, because the actions are too large and impersonal. The stories will reveal nothing about the real man who lived.”
― David Vann, Bright Air Black

“There can be no god without desire.”
― David Vann, Bright Air Black